Loupgarou
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, sequel to 'The Mark of the Fox' and 'Wolf in the Making.' Harry has managed to flee from Draco, but Draco's Mark still burns on his arm, and Draco is reaching for him in more ways than one. COMPLETE.
1. Shedding Skin

**Title: **Loup-garou

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Warnings: **Violence, angst, manipulation, Dark!Draco and Harry, possible dub-con.

**Rating: **R

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco preslash, Ron/Hermione

**Summary: **Harry has managed to escape Draco, or at least Draco's immediate grasp. But the Fox Mark still burns on his arm, and his enemy and captor is reaching for him in more ways than one.

**Author's Notes: **This is the third in what I'm calling the Fox and Wolf series. It follows "The Mark of the Fox" and "Wolf in the Making" and won't make sense without them, so I suggest you read those first. Again, as with the first two stories, this is pretty dark and may not be everyone's cup of tea. The title comes from a French word meaning "werewolf." I think this story will probably be twelve or thirteen chapters long.

**Loup-garou**

_Chapter One-Shedding Skin_

"I think it would help if you told us everything, Harry."

Harry shivered. He was standing at the floor-length, wall-wide glass window on the second floor of Ron and Hermione's house, staring out over the gently rolling orange and gold landscape that, it seemed, Ron found relaxing and Hermione inspiring.

"I don't know what more I can tell you," he said, and heard his voice sound muffled in his own ears. "I mean. You know as much about the Mark as I do, and as much about Malfoy as I do. I told you how I tricked him out of some of his secrets by pretending to comply with him, and how I managed to escape. That's all."

_Liar, _his own mind said to him, the thought flickering out and withdrawing like a lizard's tongue.

Harry closed his eyes. There were two things he hadn't told Hermione. One was how Malfoy had forced him into sex, how Harry could have resisted but had used the chance to cast a charm that would take advantage of Malfoy's relaxed state instead. He wasn't about to confess to his best friends that he'd slept with the enemy when they already watched him as if he were a stranger.

The second thing was that he'd killed Robards and held Malfoy under the Cruciatus Curse. Harry had said that Malfoy was so busy torturing Robards he hadn't noticed Harry getting ready to escape and then managing to actually do it. Of course Hermione and Ron would get the news in the form of, well, news from Britain eventually, but there was no reason for them to think that Harry had been the murderer, rather than Malfoy choosing a more violent message than the Cruciatus.

_If someone doesn't trace your magical signature. If someone doesn't wonder what that strange mark on Robards's arm means and starts doing some research into it._

"There's something you're not admitting," Hermione whispered. "Do you not trust us, Harry? I knew that we'd changed, but not _that _much."

Harry turned and looked at her. She stood in the middle of the large study she'd equipped on this floor, her hands on her hips and her wide, appealing eyes fixed on his face.

Harry had been apart from his best friends for the past two years, since they'd emigrated to Australia. He'd never really expected to see them again. He had accepted exile as his fate, since everyone around him seemed unconcerned after Ron and Hermione left, and the ones who had tried to "heal" him, in Robards's case, had been lying to him. Robards had hoped that he would die in Fox Valley, or, more likely, that he and Malfoy would kill each other.

It hadn't worked out that way at all. Harry's hand went to the Mark on his arm, hidden under his sleeve, which burned at odd moments. It was burning now.

"It's nothing," Harry said. "I'm really grateful that you've let me stay here. I should probably leave soon, though."

"And go where?" Hermione took a step towards him, emotions so mingled on her face that Harry couldn't tell what she was feeling, which usually never happened to him with her. "This is the best place you can be."

Harry shook his head. "It's like you said, I've changed," he muttered. "And you've changed. And this is the first place Malfoy would look. I have to go." He dodged her outstretched hand and trotted across the large, open room, paneled with wood and surrounded with shelves, to the stairs that led down to the first floor. Hermione hesitated, then followed. Harry knew he would probably get another interrogation shortly, from Ron if not from her.

But Harry knew he couldn't answer. His friends had been a refuge for him in what was probably the greatest crisis of his life. But they would turn from him if they found out that he was a murderer and a torturer. Hell, they would probably turn away from him if they knew the details of the case that had sent him to Fox Valley to "recover" in the first place, where he had tried to rescue some victims from a fire and caused the collapse of the roof instead, killing them.

It was wrong not to tell them. Maybe Harry would owl them when he was safely away and confess everything. But right now, he needed them to be his refuge for a little while longer.

* * *

"My l-lord."

Draco gave a faint smile in the direction of the ceiling, not bothering to open his eyes. He always knew when one of his Marked ones approached him, thanks to his formation of their Marks, but Oliver's voice would have told him who it was even if he didn't have that.

"Oliver," he said, and opened his eyes to study the man in front of him, who seemed insubstantial as dandelion fluff. Oliver started away from him and then came slowly nearer again, pulling at his thin grey moustache. Draco smiled. "I want to know if your pets can track someone down on the other side of the world."

Oliver's eyes widened, and his breath sped up to a rasping panic. "I would have to g-go with my darlings," he whispered. "And people would t-try to d-destroy them. And _me_." His eyes gleamed now, not with cunning but with tears.

Draco nodded. "You couldn't send them without you, then? I wondered."

Oliver cocked his head and sucked the back of his teeth. Draco could hear his tongue clicking, and held his patience and his silence. The emotions flowing through the Mark on Oliver's arm let Draco know that he was rippling away from panic, and that was the best Draco could ask for at that moment.

"No," Oliver said at last. "And this is theoretical, my lord." He checked Draco's face. Draco nodded. Oliver smiled, and his voice grew as strong as it ever had. "I couldn't send them without me, _theoretically_, because they would cause notice and increase their risk of attack. And if they broke apart from each other to travel without causing attacks, then they would become distracted by their prey and less focused on your will. I wouldn't be there to remind them, either. Which I never want to happen, lord," he added piously. "I never want to betray you! Never!"

Draco inclined his head. "Understood. Dimissed."

Oliver left the room with one hand extended to a swirl of grey. Draco considered for a moment whether someone who could command Dementors but was less _wet _would have served him better.

Then he shook his head. Oliver was the only person who could command Dementors that Draco had ever discovered, and that alone made him valuable. Besides, Draco was well-served by working with the possible or remolding his dreams into shapes he could attain. He had never aimed at the impossible.

_Except once._

Draco smiled and stood, pausing only to cross out Oliver's name on a list in front of him. Even that "once" had not become impossible. Draco was moving in a leisurely fashion, though. No reason to charge ahead in random directions and waste energy.

A knock sounded on the door. Draco glanced up. "Come, Lisa."

Lisa stepped into the room, bristling as she stalked towards his desk. Draco sat down again, a small smile playing along his lips. Thalia was the Marked one who could transform into a jaguar, but Lisa looked at the moment as if she had acquired the ability. "You wished to see me," she said.

Draco shook his head. "I wished to see you on that matter of business this morning, yes. We cleared it up. This time, you came of your own free will."

Lisa paused, caught flat-footed for the barest moment. Then she folded her arms and gave him her best rendition of a sneering stare. "You don't understand what you're doing to Fox Valley," she said.

"If you intend to lecture me about resolved business, I do not wish to listen," Draco said, and sent a mild jolt, as though she had crossed a carpet in a clinging robe, through the Mark on her arm. Her emotions flowed towards him in deep, muddled response. Draco smiled, because that was the reaction that would best serve him at the moment. "If you intend to tell me about a problem that has arisen with the lenses drawing magic from our clients, then I will listen with deep and undivided attention."

"You don't need to mock me," Lisa hissed, drawing a step away.

"Mockery is a privilege reserved for the one in power," Draco said. He waited, hooking his hands together behind his head. As he waited, he sent his mind seeking out, trying to imagine that it crossed ocean and land together, to find the Mark that he had put on Harry's arm.

As always, he felt nothing. But he hadn't seriously tried yet, and he had never had a Marked one travel so far beyond his reach before. Draco was a predator, and so he knew patience.

"Fine, then." Lisa's eyes glittered like chips of mica, and she came closer to his desk than she normally approached. "You're ruining Fox Valley because you're ignoring it to yearn after _Potter_. I want you to pay attention to the running of the business that makes us our Galleons again. I want you to spend time repairing the lenses and devising new ways to store magic. I want you to Mark someone new who would take up some time and trouble to tame. You can have anything you want, Lord Malfoy. You always could. But not Potter."

"Anything includes Potter," Draco pointed out. "A fine point of semantics, but then, I am concerned, lest fine points be ground down."

"Includes him," Lisa said, with the inflexibility of someone determined not to give in even though she had been wrong. A lamentable failing, in Draco's opinion, at least for everyone who was not him. "Is _not _him. Give up on Potter, my lord. He managed to flee from you, and you don't know where he went."

Draco fixed her with a bright stare, and waited until her words and her determination wound down of their own accord. Then he sighed. "Lisa, whose Mark do you wear?"

"Yours," Lisa said, peering about for a moment as though she expected another contender to step out of the woodwork. That only increased Draco's feeling that he'd been too lax about discipline lately. He really _should _have remembered that when his smarter subordinates stopped getting his jokes, that was always a sign.

"Yes," Draco said. "Who is your life forfeit to?"

Lisa stared at him.

"Oh, only if I decide I want it," Draco hastened to reassure her. "And that is some times more than others. But if you are more useful to me alive, then I shall never require it."

Lisa clenched her hands hard for a moment, swallowed, and then said, "My lord, I don't understand the point of your questioning."

"Your head and body are mine," Draco said softly. He didn't rise to his feet, but Lisa backed away from the desk anyway. Good. She was starting to understand. Draco had Marked no one stupid, so it distressed him when they acted that way. "And the thoughts that fill your head should be as well."

Lisa bowed and slinked towards the door of his office. Draco sighed. A simple statement of fact shouldn't have made her act this way. But then again, Lisa had never had the nerve to keep up her defiance of him, the way Harry had. She had defied him up to a point, and then she had broken, a cowardice she had never recovered from.

Just like Lisa's opinions, Draco found the cowardice painful at times, but useful, which was why he had never labored to correct it.

"I will give you charge of the Valley when I leave," he continued. "I hope that you will keep and run it as well as you think I should."

Lisa stiffened all over, as if her body had turned to bone. Draco smiled and bounced his foot off the floor, reading her in the meantime. The Mark once again filled with a muddy tide of emotions.

"You are leaving in search of Potter," Lisa said flatly, without turning. "Forgive me, my lord, if the news does not fill me with joy."

"It should not," Draco said. "I regard the news as a small matter of fact, interesting only to him and myself. You may, of course, look at the list I have made of possible ways to locate Potter, only to have each choice in turn taken from me." He picked up the parchment from which he had crossed out Oliver's name and held it towards her.

Lisa approached his desk like an animal once caught in a trap, eyeing him and ready to flinch every time. Draco maintained his demeanor and his stance, and she snatched the parchment away and scanned it.

"Oliver's Dementors were a good thought," she said at last. "Why can't you use them?"

Draco shrugged. "They can't travel separately from him without causing a great deal of trouble and nuisance, or breaking away to feed and getting themselves noticed. And I do not think it a good idea, or worth the trouble, to send Oliver to guide them."

"No." Lisa leaned one elbow on his desk, and then hastily straightened again. Draco nodded. The flow of the stream of her emotions through the Mark was clear and strong again. "I would have thought you could send Thalia to track him, my lord."

"He used a Portkey," Draco said. "She could go to Australia, perhaps, but they are stricter with unregistered Animagi than Britain. I would rather not lose _two _Marked ones."

"And we would rather not lose you."

Draco smiled. He had known something was wrong when Lisa had bowed her head and given in too tamely. The woman he knew, the woman he had Marked, would never do something such as that. "I know that, Lisa. I assure you, this venture has less danger than you anticipate. I have information sources that Potter cannot guess at, and more hooks in his soul than you know."

"He doesn't want to sleep with you, my lord," Lisa said. She flushed and flinched in the same moment, but continued speaking. "I should have thought it easy for you to snare someone both whom you desired and who desired you."

Draco half-bowed his head. "Yes, I understand that impression," he said. "Remember that you cannot read his Mark."

How was he to explain to someone else the uneasy wavering between rebellion and yielding, the refusal and the hatred, the heat and the hardness, that had come through Harry's Mark to him? How was he to explain to someone else the jerk of the muscled body against his, the splash of Harry's come across his hand, and the way he _could _have pulled away but did not? Or the way he had used the chance to cast a spell on Draco that he thought would make Draco babble all his secrets?

Draco had the right to fury at that last tactic, and he had the right to reserve his fury. There would be no glory in taming a magnificent horse if it submitted to the rope.

Lisa settled down after that. She would accept the charge of the Valley, and that would leave him free to go hunting. Of all his Marked ones, she was the one Draco trusted most. The broken edge of the cowardice in her gave him a handle to cling to and manipulate at need.

When he was alone in his office, Draco leaned back in his chair and placed his right hand on his left arm. He needed to do something he had never done before, which was why he required solitude and silence. He had run five Marked ones like a chain of hounds in the middle of his clients before, but he had years of practice in such things.

He could recover from a failure, but in private only. Or perhaps if he shared one with Harry, who had the highest ability to obsess over a failure while still doing splendid things that Draco had ever seen.

He took a deep breath and shut his eyes. His left hand rested on a bracelet of gold set with seed pearls, one of the vessels in which he regularly stored magic. He released the breath in stutters, using each pause in it to press his fingers against a different pearl.

The air around him heated, shimmered, became soft. Draco took the magic to himself and rose into the softness, turning his head from side to side. Feathers rustled around him, the sound of wings. He was a falcon, or could imagine himself so, feeding power into the idea so that it became more real.

Draco's mind worked on two levels, one analyzing his own actions, one believing completely in the falcon, and so he soared and dipped and dived in the general direction of Australia. He knew Harry had gone there. Where within the continent, he didn't know.

It wouldn't matter, not if he could use the Mark in the right way. He envisioned it as sight to the falcon's eyes, and once again sharpened the eyes until the country below jerked and seemed to come into view. Then it jerked again, and now he was flying on the level where he could see individual buildings and trees. Another bob, and now he was among the people, flickering and dancing through them like a ghost, passing from mind to mind and finding nothing like Potter's complicated mixture of desire and repugnance, or the Mark blazing on his arm.

The Muggles had courteously left parts of the country uninhabited, however. Draco hovered, and then shot towards one of them. He thought he was getting close. The walls of blackness around the image had fallen back and formed a familiar shape: a window. Windows had framed the dreams that he and Harry had shared through the Mark right before Harry went away.

The window spun and wavered, but Draco drew on more power, and then he was flying through the frame. Thoughts sleeted down past him. Draco ignored them effortlessly, soaring on wings of memory into memory. Pin down the moment when Harry had first arrived and he should have the name of the city, or at least the village or house. It would make sense of the new generation of Weasels had named their home, the way that their burrowing ancestors had.

Steady, and the moment of pouncing drew near. Draco's sight sharpened to the point of pain. His breaths rattled in his chest. His wings flared.

And a rope of magic caught his falcon around the neck and strangled it to death. Draco snapped his eyes open and found himself clutching an empty bracelet. When he separated his fingers from it, he could see that it was bent, as though part of it had melted in a fire and been reforged.

Draco sat up, breathing fast. Then he calmed his breathing and summoned Thalia through his Mark, calling for a cup of tea and a plate of hot bread and butter. He usually wanted to eat after expending so much magical energy in a hunt.

So. Potter knew that Draco was hunting him now, and Draco had not discovered the exact location of the Weasleys' house, as Potter had sensed him and thrown him out of his mind before that could happen.

Well.

His food and tea arrived, with Thalia's murmured apology for taking two minutes, and Draco held up the ivory cup to the sunlight, admiring the complex pattern of light and shadow that particularly sensitive eyes could pick out in the way the sun illuminated the cup.

Then he shifted, arching his shoulders as his erection brushed against the tray.

He _did _enjoy the dangerous ones.

* * *

Harry sat up in bed, his hands curled so hard into fists that he had to concentrate to work them loose.

Malfoy _could _track him through the Mark. He hadn't been sure, but when several days had gone by with no attempt and no sign of one, Harry had decided that he was safe.

Well, fuck.

Harry lowered his head and sat for a few minutes with it in his hands, contemplating. He had to make plans, plans that didn't involve Ron and Hermione. They'd been kind to him, but there were things that they couldn't know, in case they ended up never speaking to him again.

He swallowed through a dry throat. He didn't know Australia, and didn't know where he could go. On the other hand, he didn't want to leave the country. He couldn't come up with a plausible excuse for _that_, either, and the other places he could go where he might be safe from Malfoy were equally unknown to him.

_Fuck._

Harry lay back in the bed and looked up at the brown ceiling of the room Hermione and Ron had given him, which was covered with pictures of trailing branches with small, bright leaves. Harry didn't think that anything like them actually grew in the land outside Ron and Hermione's house, but that didn't matter. They relaxed him, and he stared until his eyes drooped and his mind went as deep as still water behind them.

Malfoy knew where he was, or would soon. And he at least knew that Harry had fled to Australia. Harry wouldn't put it past him to come physically, as he'd already sent his magic searching. He might also be able to establish a stronger link through Harry's Mark, and then he could, perhaps, do things like inflict pain from a distance until Harry surrendered.

There was only one solution, and Harry thought now that he had always known it. He had to kill Malfoy.

Malfoy had said that it was impossible for someone Marked to kill the Mark's creator, but Harry had been the living exception to several laws of magic in his time. He thought Malfoy could be wrong.

And there was another probable solution, as well. Harry circled his finger around his left arm, near the line of his shoulder.

Hermione had taken up medical magic as a hobby since she and Ron had moved. Harry had seen the books lining the shelves of her study, and Ron's study, and the main library, and the "second" library on the ground floor. (Harry didn't know why they called it the second library when it was actually the first library you would meet walking into the house, but then again, there were a lot of things that he didn't necessarily understand about his best friends anymore).

Harry was sure that, if he had to, he could find a book on amputation of a limb.

_I will not be a slave._


	2. Thylacine's Lair

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two-Thylacine's Lair_

Draco looked over the last ledger, and then shut it with an echoing snap. The snap seemed louder than it should have with two people in the office, but for the last half-hour Lisa had been so still that Draco couldn't hear her breathing.

"Here," he said, extending the ledger to her. "Even if you lose out on some of the clients that only my personal charm can lure to the Valley, there are still enough coming in the next month to make up any lost profit. And all the lenses have been repaired. Watch the large one in the house nearest to the pool, though. It's less stable than the others, and tends to crack again in a few weeks."

Lisa shut her eyes, as though to contemplate the large lens in the house nearest the pool. In reality, Draco knew that she would think about nothing so sensible. "Must you, Lord Malfoy?" she asked flatly. "Do you think that being gone for a month will give us _reassurance _about what you intend?"

"No," Draco said.

Lisa's eyes snapped open, and she stared at him.

"I intend to give you no reassurance," Draco said. "Why should I? You can do well enough on your own. You can send me a thought through the Mark when you need to, and I can communicate with you in the same manner. No need for clumsy owls. I will return in an instant if a crisis arises."

"Or what you consider a crisis," Lisa said, but the thought was half-breathed, and she was already falling back from him, holding the ledger and staring at the floor, as though it would give her an answer to her qualms.

"Yes," Draco said. "Remember whose thoughts should be in your head." He rose to his feet, wondering for a moment if Potter's rebelliousness had infected his other Marked ones. Lisa, though, showed no signs of hexing him and taking off to the other side of the world. She just stood there, ledger securely in her arms, and shivered.

"Tell me what it is you fear," Draco said, because the emotions flowing through the Mark had acquired that pointed edge. "That Potter will kill me? That I will never return and you will be left holding the ledger forever? I promise that will not happen." In the unlikely event that he did die, Draco had already set up certain magical precautions that would ensure Lisa would not hold the position of leader forever. She was unsuited to it, given her cowardice.

"I fear that you'll lose your way," Lisa said bluntly, gaze rising to his. "That Potter will enchain you with desire and kill you that way. Not your body, but your ambition, your magic, your greatness."

Draco paused. Despite his determination to act without regard to what Lisa thought of him, the ideas she had just expressed held him. "You think I have greatness," he said, tasting and testing the word.

"Yes, of course," Lisa said, holding up her left arm. "You came up with the Mark. You tamed us and subdued us, and most of us fought harder than Potter did." Draco carefully removed one of the points he had used to give Lisa for understanding the way the world worked. "You came up with a way to drain other wizards' magic and give yourself the power, when for many years most Dark wizards had thought the second step was theoretically impossible. You are great."

Draco tilted his head down, as if modestly, and let his stance do his talking for him. He knew that Potter had felt his emotions through the Mark, but none of his others had ever done it.

But his brain was busy with her assertion, and his own lack of belief in it.

What had he done with his stored magic? Nothing except create more lenses that would increase both the drain on the magic of visiting wizards and their compulsion to visit Fox Valley again, strengthen his control over his Marked ones, and take revenge on Robards, who had betrayed him. His ambition had no channel.

He had the strength to become a Dark Lord, but not the desire. He had seen the path that war led down, and did not see why he should follow it. He despised Mudbloods, but they were among his customers, and his time tasting and employing their magic had taught him how wrong one of the common misconceptions was: they were no weaker than pure-bloods. In fact, some of the families with scions weakened by inbreeding displayed far less vigor than the wild strain of Mudbloods.

He had thought that he remained quiet because that meant less chance of those who had more power than he did noticing him. And he wasn't stupid. There _were _still other people in the world with more power than he had. The Ministry. Some of the Dark wizards in Europe. A few of the werewolf packs. They could take his invention from him, and no one would care.

But the excuse had worn thin now, as much in the face of Potter's scorn as of Lisa's unshakable belief.

He had to do something with his power. He was no better than Dumbledore if he did not, who had accumulated control and then sat with his hands tied by his own ethical scruples.

"Thank you, Lisa," Draco said abruptly. "You have given me something to think about." Her eyes brightened, and she reached out with one hand as though she would touch him, but he gave her a smile that made her shrink back again. "Now, go on a walking tour of the lenses. You need to be able to distinguish the echoes of one lens's magic from another's in an instant if a ward sounds alerting you that one is cracked."

Lisa bowed to him and scuttled out, rustling the ledger she held as if it contained all the answers. Draco touched his mouth and watched the movement repeated in the mirror above his desk.

He would hunt Potter and bring him down, to make him the tame wolf Draco had envisioned, hunting at his side. That might not tell him what to do with the rest of his life. But it would be a good challenge.

A good waking from the long sleep.

* * *

"Is there a reason that you're looking at the medical magic books, Harry?"

Harry started and lifted his head. He had lapsed into a dreaming state over the latest book he was looking at, half-reading the words and half-trying to imagine what good they would do him against Malfoy, and so he hadn't heard Hermione enter the library. He turned around and found her standing behind him, hands on her hips, eyes so wide open that he couldn't tell whether she was trying to avoid falling tears or angry shouts.

"Yes," Harry said, rubbing his eyes. "I had a dream that gave me a possible way to take off the Mark." More lies, but what could he say about the truth? "I thought I remembered something that I read in one of the books that would help," he added with a sigh, looking at the books piled beside him. Luckily, none of them were _just _about amputation, so the possibility that Hermione would guess what he was working towards was small. "But I didn't find anything. I was remembering wrong, or I reckon that it's in one of the books I haven't consulted after all."

Hermione's face softened, and she came closer, glancing at the titles of the books in his pile before she turned to the one he was reading. "What was the method?"

"Um..." Harry tried to stretch his frantic scrambling for an idea out into what seemed like a thinking silence. And then an idea that he _had _thought of last week and rejected came to him, saving his arse. "I thought that maybe, if I removed the skin where the Mark was and came up with something that would remove the link to my magic at the same time, it would work. What do you think?"

Hermione touched her lips with one finger, eyes shadowed. "It _might._ I don't know how deep the Mark is, so I can't say for sure. Would you let me look at it?" She drew her wand.

Harry nodded as if he wasn't wary of her finding out something she shouldn't, and held out his left arm. He averted his gaze as soon as possible from the stylized running fox, though. He _hated _the way it looked, like a brand. Even the scar on his forehead had never felt so much like that to him, maybe because Voldemort hadn't put it there deliberately.

Hermione waved her wand over the Mark and intoned several soft incantations, one of which made the Mark glow purple, the others of which didn't seem to do anything. At last she slid the wand into the sheath on her left sleeve and stepped away, shaking her head and frowning. "I don't understand. Those spells ought to have shown me the Mark's magical connections and how deep into your skin it ran, whether it was comparable to a scab or a scar or something in between. But all it does is return this _nullity_, as if I were casting the spells on a mirage."

_Thank you, Malfoy's paranoia, _Harry thought. He covered up the Mark again and shrugged. "Then I might as well continue researching, right? I mean, if we don't _know, _then I might find a collection of spells I can use."

Hermione smiled for the first time in what seemed like several days. "Yes, you're right. And any of the spells we try might work." She reached out and gently put one hand on his back. "I think you've done enough for now, though. You look as if you'd been up most of the night. Come and have breakfast."

Harry nodded and stood to come with her. When her back was turned, he did cast a Tracking Charm on the books, so that if she or Ron put them back on the shelves before he was done, he'd be able to find them again.

He didn't think his friends would deliberately sabotage him even if they understood what he was doing; they were much more likely to insist that he go back and turn himself into the Ministry for Robards's murder. But they might gather up the books for another reason, and Harry didn't want to waste time finding them again.

He had the impression that time was important.

* * *

"My lord."

Draco concealed his sneer as he stepped out of the private Floo into the home of Reynard Higgins, the "confidential agent" recommended to him by several of his contacts in Britain. The man had no idea why Draco _deserved _the title. It was simply the greeting, combined with his deep bow, that he would use to any male visitor.

"Mr. Higgins," he said, and looked around the room he had stepped into. It was decorated and furnished in a violent color somewhere between orange and brown that made Draco's head ache with its lack of taste. Higgins had only two chairs, but the hearth took up most of the room. It, at least, was made of plain grey stone. Draco addressed it rather than Higgins as he said, "I need a room here in High Rock, and information on all wizard dwellings anywhere in Australia."

Higgins almost swallowed his tongue. "My lord," he said in a voice that remained steady only through obvious effort, "that will take some time to gather."

"You don't keep a list of all wizards living here on hand?" Draco asked. He knew that Australia's wizarding community was smaller than the one in Britain, despite the size of the continent. Many of them were, apparently, recent immigrants who either tended not to have children or sent their children to school elsewhere.

"No," said Higgins. His face was the color of weak tea, but he did add, "If you wished to have a list of all the residents of High Rock, that of course would be easier to procure."

Draco had always hated the sound of the word "procure," which rolled off people's lips with a sneering undertone. He looked at Higgins, and he backed away, bowing, and said, "Of course, my lord, your wishes will be attended to right away. Your room is ready," he added, and rang a small bell set into the wall that Draco doubted he would have noticed until his attention was called to it.

A house-elf appeared, wearing an orange towel, and led Draco in silence through the rest of a convoluted house and to another Floo. On the mantle were a bowl of Floo powder and a small pamphlet saying, THYLACINE'S LAIR.

Draco looked from the elf to the pamphlet, questioning whether he should speak the name to get to his destination. The elf bowed again, and so Draco cast his handful of powder in along with his voice.

When he opened his eyes in the room he'd been directed to, he laughed aloud. This had taste, which meant Higgins had nothing to do with it.

The walls were made of plain, pale blue stone, a color Draco had never seen before, and the furniture-large bed, chairs, writing desk, tables, footstools-was in pale colors to match it. The bed had proper sheets, pillows, and two sets of blankets, as well as Cooling Charms in case one's desire wasn't for heat. When Draco stepped up to the headboard to examine it, he saw that the wood was covered with delicate carvings showing thylacines: standing, hunting, pacing, guarding with their backs up. He nodded. It was acceptable.

After all, it wasn't as if he would have to stay here very long. Higgins would retrieve the list of names for him, he would learn where the Weasleys lived, and he would go after Harry there. The taming and wrestling to the ground that he wanted to do with Harry could always take place back in Fox Valley.

_Although it would be a shame not to use the bed, at least once._

* * *

"Did you sleep well, mate?"

Harry nodded his lie and took another forkful of scrambled eggs. Ron grunted and took another forkful of bangers. Hermione had already finished breakfast, spelled the plates to clean and dry themselves, and gone off to do her work for the day in the Australian Ministry. Ron apparently worked in Prevention of Fires, which alternated between insanely busy, actively busy during training, and not busy at all. Today was one of the "not busy at all" days, Harry guessed wisely.

He picked up another forkful of eggs and studied Ron. Two years in Australia didn't seem to have changed him much, except that he'd finally stopped peeling and developed a respectable tan. He was as tall as ever, as hungry as ever, as red-haired as ever.

_Well, there's one other difference, _Harry thought as he continued eating. _The silence._

He couldn't remember a breakfast at Hogwarts when Ron hadn't been full of chatter, speculation, jokes, insults, complaints, and plans for Quidditch or free periods or tricking Slytherins. This Ron ate as though there was nothing more fascinating in the world than his food, and never looked up.

Harry didn't think it was because Ron didn't want him here. But they _had _drifted apart, barely communicating in the last few years, and Harry thought Ron knew better than Hermione did that he was hiding something.

"When do you intend to go back to England, mate?"

Harry started a little and nearly dropped his fork. He looked up to find that Ron's eyes were locked on him, and-yes-they were shrewder than Harry could wish when he had something of this magnitude to conceal. He shrugged as casually as he could and picked some more at his food.

"I don't know yet. I reckon it would depend on whether I can get some information about Malfoy, whether he's been captured and stopped or not."

"I don't understand why you don't just let the Ministry know." Ron shook his head, frowning. "Even if some people there don't like you, there _has _to be someone concerned about a Dark Lord like that." He paused. "_Do _you think that Malfoy is a Dark Lord yet?"

Harry had to laugh. "I think he wants to be, or at least wants to think of himself as someone who has the potential, but not yet, no. He just wants to sit around sleekly admiring himself-" _and making a few people's individual lives hell_ "-and commanding his servants to bring him wine and tea while he grows fatter and fatter with the money and the magic he's taking in."

Ron nodded. "Then I'd think the greatest danger is that he might lend the magic to someone else for evil purposes, or come up with a way to Mark just about everyone in the world. You should still let the Ministry know about him."

"I know," Harry said. "I'm going to write to them."

Ron nodded as though the issue was settled, and then started talking about one of the fires he'd helped put out last month. Harry listened, more than willing to learn about Ron's life, although it reminded him how deep the gap between him and his friends was now.

_Still better than the life I would have had if I had stayed in Fox Valley as one of Malfoy's Marked Ones._

Towards the end, Harry thought, he had been sliding down the slope into the darkness, about to give up in rage and despair the way Lisa had. Or, worse, he had been allowing Malfoy to seduce him, to believe the git's talk about crimes not needing forgiveness and Harry being fuckable-as if that excused what he had done, or what he was about to do, with regard to Robards.

Was being horrified about what had happened enough? Was hating that part of himself and condemning it to death enough?

Harry thought at the moment that he most dreaded Malfoy recapturing him not because he would be trapped and lose his freedom, but because he might lose his conscience and become a wretched parody of himself. There _had _to be a way to get rid of the Mark. He'd go back to the books this afternoon.

* * *

Draco finished the list that Higgins had given him and tossed it on the bed in disgust. The Weasleys weren't listed. While the wizarding communities in Australia weren't large or numerous, they were scattered, and Draco was distinctive, even under a glamour; true breeding would always show itself, his parents had taught him. He didn't think he could visit them and retain his anonymity for long.

Not to mention that he had already warned Harry through the magical searching he had done using the Mark.

_Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to do a more delicate search, _Draco thought, leaning back against the headboard and closing his eyes, listening to his heartbeat until it became musical again, a drum of confidence and security, not the arrhythmic song of a panicked animal. _I could locate an image through his eyes and do more to track him down that way. _He had hoped that, once he landed in Australia, he would be able to simply turn his head and fix on a direction towards his Marked one the way he could in Fox Valley, but Harry was still too far from him.

_I shall have to redesign the Marks so that I can use them more widely, _he thought, and amused himself with ideas for how to do so until he was sure that he could make the search safely. He laid his hand over his left arm and again sketched out a window in his mind. This time, he paid attention to the frame and the sill, creating them out of the same distinctive pale wood and with the same carvings as the headboard behind him.

He thought that part of his problem with the last hunt was that he had been relying too heavily on the Mark, creating a sense of reaching out towards Potter without much of a sense of himself. Potter had felt Draco's desire to find him and leaped to block him as soon as he could. This time, Draco would lean on _his _magic, _his _side of the Mark, and try what was essentially a passive search: projecting a match for Potter's Mark into the magical atmosphere and seeing what responded.

He made himself stop breathing for a long moment, holding his breath until sparks exploded behind his eyelids. Then he released it with a long whoosh, and thought of the weight it had acquired in his lungs, how his heart kicked and bounded against his chest, the relief of the cool new air pouring in.

The sensations combined with the magic of his Mark and formed a circle, a flowing set of feelings that Draco knew no one other than himself could sense. Then he held his breath, let it out a second later than before, and so widened the circle. Sitting still, he grew bigger and bigger.

And he cast resonances of the Mark and his intentions in the direction of anything that wanted to respond to them. Draco was counting on making contact with at least a few other minds like his own, perhaps some other wizards meditating, but also with Potter and his Mark.

The window frame in his mind grew sharper and brighter. The circles of breath grew wider and wider. Draco knew they would inevitably weaken as they traveled further away from him, like all concentric circles, but he should be able to cover the entire continent before the magic ran out and left him exhausted.

If Harry was still in Australia-and where else would he have gone?-Draco would find him.

* * *

Harry brushed at his temple and frowned into the book on amputations he was reading. It felt as though a particularly persistent fly was brushing past him again and again. Harry had already looked for it, to cast a Shooing Charm, and hadn't seen it. Well, presumably it would land on his book at some point and he would see it clearly against the white pages.

The books weren't helpful. They kept saying that he had no chance of surviving an amputation unless he had someone else there to cast the necessary spells and stanch the blood flow, because he would be in too much shock and pain to do so. And dying wasn't part of Harry's plan unless suicide was the only way to keep his freedom. He would much rather that _Malfoy _died, instead.

_Well, that's another plan._

Harry's fingers opened. He watched them and imagined them closing around Malfoy's throat, crushing it, leaving deep red finger imprints on the bastard's pale skin. He would love to kill him that way, without magic, without offering a chance for the prat to steal from him. He would love to watch the life drain out of his eyes.

Abruptly he shuddered and buried his head in his hands, wishing out of the corner of his mind that the fly would go away.

_This Mark _is _turning me into a monster._

But there remained little choice: if he couldn't get rid of the Mark, then he had to kill Malfoy. Perhaps he should be studying methods of murder, instead. Harry grimaced and closed the book he was reading, standing up to put it on the shelves.

The fly seemed to ram straight into his head, and he caught a glimpse of Malfoy, leaning back in a large pale chair, hand on his arm, hair ruffled behind him, lips parted, eyes shut.

Harry knew it wasn't a memory of Malfoy from Fox Valley. He knew, therefore, what it must be, and he struck as hard as and as fast as he could, shoving raw magic into the Mark and down the connection to Malfoy.

The image in his head wavered like a pond with a stone tossed into the middle of it. Harry snatched his wand. If it was possible to kill Malfoy from a distance, then he was going to.

_Got you, bastard, _he thought hysterically, a moment before the Malfoy in his head opened his eyes and the battle was joined.


	3. Between the Worlds

_Chapter Three-Between the Worlds_

In another moment, Draco knew, he would have had the information he wanted. He had thrown the light rings of his breathing around Harry, and Harry had continued ignorant. Draco could have snared him, and then he would have pulled the information free, as easily as plucking a hair, and they would be back together before Harry had time to regret his rebellion.

Not that Draco would not have made him regret it later.

But Harry had sensed him-how, Draco still didn't know-and leaped to his feet, seizing his wand. And then Draco felt a blast of magic travel towards him, a feathery white ray that he watched approach without any clear idea of what it would do to him.

The ray struck and Draco shrieked in pain. Harry had somehow tossed back at him all the agony that had ever flared through the Mark, all the punishments that Draco had handed him. How he drew on them-memory, the connection between the Mark and the way that Draco's hand rested on his left arm, good luck-Draco didn't know. He drew himself up and flicked his will like a whip, aiming it through the Mark to crack down on Harry's back.

Harry shrieked, too. Draco was glad. He _should_ shriek. He had sent the sensation of having one's spine broken, which he remembered from a curse that an escaping client had hurled at him.

But Harry never properly paused to consider pain, which meant he countered instantly with a blue stream of light Draco tried to dodge. He couldn't. The Mark and the connection it forged between them acted like a conduit, like a chain, bringing down the same sensation, only multiplied, through Draco's limbs.

Harry sprang again, launching his third attack as Draco still writhed. This time, he concentrated it on the Mark itself, and Draco sensed many small and busy teeth ripping at the skin that he'd branded. They would gnaw off the Mark or the arm that bore it, he thought. Harry would be nothing but glad.

With breath that came short with pain, Draco laughed. The gnawing paused. Draco spoke down the distance between them, pacing his words so that Harry would think the hesitations in his voice came from the laughter and not from the anguish he was still experiencing.

"Do you think amputation will free you? The Mark is tied to your magic and your soul. It will manifest again on your right arm if the left one is chopped off. Harry, you are _mine_. Submit, and I'll ride you gently at first."

"Then there's only one solution," Harry said, his voice, even as grim and focused as it was, familiar and long-missed enough to make Draco's balls tighten and rise.

"If you want to see it that way, yes," Draco said. "But I would call it not a solution, but a life. If you submit to me, then both of us have what we've always wanted. I, someone who can match me. You, someone who can tame your excessive guilt and shelter you from its effects. And I promise that you will have more than that. A lover who can give you pleasure that you've never imagined. A master who can give you goals that you would not have set for yourself, and insist that you meet them. Someone who can-"

A tidal wave hit him. That was the only description Draco could give it. It crashed into him, crushing his body, drowning him. He opened his mouth to take a breath of air, and found that he had swallowed water instead. It swirled into him, through his lungs, into his chest, traveling deeper.

It took a grip on his soul.

Draco had known pain in his time, through the studies that he had undertaken to learn how to construct the lenses that would drain magic, and the curses that his enemies had cast at him, and the pressures put on him by his family and the Dark Lord. He had known nothing like this, fire and ice both sinking claws into him, chaos and order tossing him back and forth between them, all the world gone in violent music.

* * *

If Robards or anyone else in the Ministry had known that Harry had learned the Soul-Severing Spell, he would have been sacked at once. And possibly tried and committed to Azkaban.

Then again, Robards had been Darker than he knew, one of Malfoy's pets. Harry might have confessed to him, if he had only known it, and worked out some deal to free him from Malfoy in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

But Harry had never dared to confess anything like this to anyone, for fear of being named a Dark wizard and sent to either the Dementor's Kiss or the rumored device the Wizengamot possessed that would take away someone's ability to practice magic. He had hoarded his secrets and used them against the other Dark wizards who were the Ministry's foes instead.

When he spoke the incantation, _Animum frango_, he did it nonverbally, though it meant he poured far more churning power into the spell than he would have done had he spoken it aloud. That didn't matter. It was important that he get it right the first time, because he knew that Malfoy would probably cripple him with the pain if he survived, but wouldn't kill him. And freedom was what Harry wanted more than anything else.

_One way or another. _If Malfoy had told the truth and the Mark was buried in Harry's magic and soul, then the harm he was wreaking on Malfoy might rebound back on him. But he would rather be dead than a slave.

He could feel Malfoy's soul weakening and shredding as he brought down a hammer of pure magical energy against it, again and again and again. It required far more strength to break down a soul than it did to split it with murder. Voldemort and the others who had created Horcruxes throughout history had done this of their own free will. Malfoy hadn't given Harry permission to cut his soul in half.

That was why it would kill him. That was why it would make Harry free.

That was why it was worth paying any price to learn, and cast, as Harry had.

Malfoy's soul writhed and twisted under his blows like a live thing, which Harry reckoned it was, in some ways. Malfoy cried out, and the shout rang in Harry's ears and traveled a distance that seemed impossible. But Harry had lost track of where they were now and what was possible. He only knew what would kill. He reared back and brought the hammer down again.

Someone seized his arm, or at least that was what it felt like. Harry, twisting, stared over his shoulder. The only thing he could think of was that one of his friends had caught him and was holding him back. They would have had to recognize the spell in the first place, but that might not be impossible, either.

Instead, a misty shape that resembled Malfoy in the hair and eyes hovered behind him, and said in a hissing breath, "_By what we have shared, by what you have spilled, I have this much hold over you. Stop._"

Harry tried to shake off the spirit and return to his hammering. He knew Malfoy's soul had come close to cracking, and next to that, not all the strange warnings in the world could hold him back.

But the spirit's hold strengthened, and then he dragged Harry off whatever perch he'd been sitting on and hugged him close, hissing more words in his ear that Harry didn't recognize. Both of his arms were around Harry's chest, and he held him so strongly that Harry couldn't even struggle. He tried anyway, with little flexes of his arms and shoulders that would have translated into harsh blows if he'd just had the freedom to act as he liked.

_Malfoy is taking my freedom away._

It maddened him, and he started to call on his wandless magic, which would exhaust him, but what did he care about exhaustion when he was on the verge of becoming Malfoy's slave again? But the spirit pressed closer, so that it felt as though part of its mist had passed inside Harry's body and started chilling his liver, and whispered more words he could understand.

"_You shall not do this thing._"

"Says you," Harry snapped back, and closed his eyes, ignoring the cold, still drawing on his wandless magic. He might not be able to accomplish the shattering of Malfoy's soul with this strange defense-what _was _it?-holding him like this, but he would do something else just as crippling and just as likely to make Malfoy back off.

* * *

Gasping, Draco hurtled back to the surface of his thoughts and floated there, part of him still joined by magic to Potter but from a distance, while he drew in breaths of air he could feel and his hair stirred against his neck again. His skin crackled with magic, hard enough to make him feel as though he was holding a lightning bolt.

And he might as well have tried to grab a lightning bolt as to have tried to wear Potter down by force, he understood now. If it hadn't been for the fact that they'd slept together and a special property of the Mark had been invoked by Potter's spilled semen on Draco's hand-the same one that would have been had one of his Marked ones turned against him after Draco had felt their spilled blood and healed their wounds-then he doubted he would have lived.

The spell was an old variation of sympathetic magic, and Draco had made sure to wind it in as a special underlayer to the Mark from the very beginning. He had thought it unlikely that any of his Marked ones would find the will or the wit to defy him when he could send enough pain through the Mark in an instant to bring them to his knees, but unlikely didn't mean impossible.

Knowing Potter was held back for as long as necessary, Draco took a few moments to smooth his hair down with a trembling hand and check the wards on the door of his room. The last thing he wanted to do was alert Higgins or someone else with shouts or the effects of his escaping power. But the wards were intact, and finally Draco had the leisure to consider what had just happened.

_Idiot!_

He wished he could say it to Potter's face, but he had to settle for that thundering shout down the corridors of his mind. The Soul-Severing curse would have rebounded and killed Potter, too. The Mark connected his soul and Draco's. He had probably felt the first intimations of that pain, as deeply as he'd driven the spell, but he had persisted anyway.

And he hadn't cared.

Draco paused to think about that, his fingers hanging forgotten in a clump of his hair until he saw them, shook his head, and brought them down again to rest on the arm of his chair. It wouldn't do to have a servant venture in and see him sitting like that, not when the loss of dignity might be irreparable.

Draco had known that Potter didn't want to be his. The desire had mattered no more than Lisa's desire to have him stay in Fox Valley. What his Marked ones did, they did by his pleasure, or risked his punishment. Draco had admired the way Potter resisted him while being sure that that resistance would crumble the moment Potter understood his lack of escape. Hadn't he been on the point of yielding to Draco several times while they still struggled back in Fox Valley?

But this...

Potter was more willing to lose his soul than he was to submit.

Yes, other people could _say _that, including Lisa, but Draco hadn't known what they meant. He had taken it for granted that Potter's defiance was half-show. No one could really want to lose his soul or commit suicide rather than give in to Draco's reasonable demands.

But he remembered a story his father had once told him, of a wild winged horse one of his friends had owned who refused to be broken to the bridle. When they tied its wings, it galloped away. When they tied its legs, it raised and broke its wings. When they tried to heal its wings, it lashed out at the men crowded around them with its teeth, making them hesitate one moment, until it could turn to the barn nearby and bash its head in.

Potter might be like that. Human rationality-what little he possessed, Draco thought in some distaste-could be drowned by the sheer and stubborn will to liberty.

He would have to reconsider his tactics, and perhaps bend a little.

Draco turned to go back into the mists of imagination and magic where he and Potter had met and where his defense was holding Potter back, prepared to offer words of healing and reconciliation, presuming that Potter would accept them. Perhaps Draco could learn to mean them.

Then magic grabbed him around the waist, a crackling rope that Draco could _see_, sparking golden and white in its depths, so thick that Draco's startled snatch at it didn't manage to break it.

The magic smelled of Potter, and tasted of him when it dripped down Draco's tongue and to the chair arm. Small, smoking holes appeared where his saliva touched. Draco started to stand, not wanting to be burned to death.

The rope tightened again, and yanked him back into the battle.

* * *

"_You cannot do this!_"

The spirit, the replica of Malfoy with its arms around Harry's waist, wailed that again and again while Harry shoved magic into it and through it. But its hold was weakening, its voice already indistinguishable from the hiss of smoke.

Harry had studied magical connections in Auror training, a part of theory left over from days when battle had been different and the Aurors smaller, often fighting against family members who shared similar power. A connection acted as a conduit to pump energy into you and weaken your heart or shatter your bones, but nothing was ever one-way. You could pump magic back, and your enemy was as likely to weaken as you were. At some point, it became a race to see who would succumb to the assault of magical energy first.

Harry would make sure it was Malfoy.

He continued shoving magic through, pouring power, envisioning it as white sand that would drown the whole of the vast black spiderweb of connections that tied them together. Because he _could_. Because he _wanted to_.

Because he would rather be dead than a slave.

The spirit had faded enough by now that Harry couldn't feel it touching him, let alone hear its voice speaking. But someone else was, roaring at him, shouting his name in between spitting mouthfuls of sand. Harry grinned and "replied"-what did words mean right now, floating in this strange land that the Mark had created between them?-with a voice that sounded real and cheerful.

"I don't think so, Malfoy. You can't talk your way out of this one, and any price you can take from me, I've already thought about paying and decided is worth it. And if I die, at least I can be assured that _that _will put an end to the Mark."

He had more power than he'd ever dreamed, ever known. He had thought he was exhausted when it came to escaping Fox Valley, but then, he'd paused in between using his magic to run away from the Marked ones who accepted their slavery, so part of his fatigue had been physical. This was like a great and gaping flow of blood that he could just watch go, because he didn't care about staunching the wound. Why should he? This was the end, one way or the other.

He did spare a brief, regretful thought for the fact that he was going to die in Ron and Hermione's house. He'd have liked to have kept them from finding his body. But then again, they would have been questioned about their complicity in hiding him if anyone had ever discovered the truth about Robards and come hunting. So maybe it was better this way.

Malfoy seized the thought and used it to reel himself closer, like a rope. "Listen to me, Harry," he said, but the desperate calmness in his voice couldn't hide the quiver, and Harry laughed. "No, listen. You want to live with your friends, don't you? You want to _go on _living, though you seem set on dying right now. If you could live free, then that would be best of all, wouldn't it? You didn't just try to kill yourself and despair in Fox Valley. You fled from me in a way that you thought would save your life."

Harry laughed back at him. "You've made it clear that I _can't _flee from you and live. So I'm dying now." It was a little harder to speak the words. Harry assumed he was coming to the end of his strength. Well, that would be fine. He'd drown Malfoy, and then his core would run out and he would die. Or maybe he would live and the Mark would fade because it no longer had anything to attach to. He didn't care. It was wonderfully freeing, not caring. "Goodbye."

He shut his eyes. The last of the magic was pouring out of him now, and he felt like a shattered, ruined husk. He wondered dreamily if he would go to his death feeling like that, or if something would change at the last minute.

"Harry. Harry, listen to me."

Harry serenely ignored him. Nothing Malfoy could say was of any interest to him, because he would only try to bargain for his life, and Harry didn't want to give it to him. He felt his breath slowing, his heartbeat fading. Suicide had seemed distasteful just a few short hours ago, but he hadn't understood the foulness or the depth of what Malfoy had done to him, then. It was better than living as the bastard's servant. It had to be.

"There's a way we can both live and still have this connection."

Harry did laugh, then, and find enough strength hiding somewhere within his drained body to reply. "I'm sure there is. All I have to do is give you the control, then lie back and think of England, right? Or Malfoy, as I'm sure that you'd rather I did."

"No..."

But Harry's sense of hearing faded then, and he drifted into a great and peaceful darkness, where there was no longer any voice, any magic, any Malfoy.

Any dreams.

* * *

_Shit!_

Draco could feel the flickering flame that was Harry dying down, fading out, drowning in its own wax. And all the while his own body ached with power, barely tamed or absorbed by the Mark, and he flailed and clutched at nothing, accomplishing nothing, his fingers slipping as he tried to hold onto Harry's soul.

He had never envisioned this. He had never _understood_. Harry had seemed so burning, so vital, so alive, so determined to strike back and change him, that Draco had assumed he would strive to live no matter what.

But now the understanding was there, as unignorable as a blade in the gut. Harry would rather die than be his. And Draco...

Draco would rather that not happen.

So he reached out with all that power, and the connection that still existed between them even now that Harry had drained his magical core, the connection binding Mark to soul and thus Harry's soul to Draco's. Draco cradled it and twisted it with giant, clumsy silver fingers, snapping the thread of the Mark.

From far away, he could sense Harry's confused response. He knew _something _had happened, but he wasn't sure what.

Draco acted hastily, because even now he thought Harry might come back and assert his presence, and Draco didn't want him slipping completely free, either. He wove a new connection between them, a lesser one, soul to soul this time, placing the Mark of the Fox on Harry's shoulder. Without the connection to his magical core, Harry wouldn't be tempted to surrender his power so that he could get rid of Draco.

And then Draco breathed the power that Harry had given him back down that lesser conduit, and into Harry, saving his life.

He knew Harry had intended to kill him, drown him, and had thought that he wouldn't be able to survive it. But Harry, though he might know something about ordinary magical connections, couldn't know everything about the Mark, which was Draco's invention and consisted of a number of intricately woven threads, one of which had channeled the magic harmlessly into Draco's own power. He might be stronger than he had ever been, but he wouldn't die.

Draco gave the power back.

He could feel the ache and the reluctance to do so in every part of him, humming in his blood and traveling through his arms like threaded nerves. He hoped that Harry understood the magnificence, the sheer scale, of what Draco was doing for him. He could have conquered the world with that much magic. And none of his Marked ones would have complained if Draco let Harry go and used that power to accomplish his goals.

Whatever they were.

Harry had revealed to him, too, that part of his life was hollow, and that he couldn't fill it solely with collecting lenses and storing artifacts.

So Draco breathed it all down, curling rose-colored waves and leaden ingots and fiery golden flowers and blue-feathered falcons, gave it back to Harry and challenged him to live at the same moment. Harry's breath stuttered and came back to life. His heart beat. His core greedily swallowed the magic, because that was what it was meant for.

By the time that Harry seemed to sense what was going on and started to fight sluggishly against him, the connection was already tight between them, shining with power, and Draco had to set up a barrier so Harry, the greedy thing, wouldn't drain _him_. He hovered over Harry for a little while longer, cradling him with the newly-woven connection, treasuring him, guarding him, imagining the moment when Harry would accept Draco's caresses on his own skin.

Draco had no fear that that would _never _happen. His determination to have Harry remained the same. But it would be on different terms, with a new Mark and a less possessive touch.

Because just as Harry had fought to hold onto his life but would give it up rather than be a slave, Draco had fought to have him but would rather have him partially than completely.

"Remember this," he told Harry, wondering how Harry was hearing his voice. "Remember me. I gave you back the gift I could have kept. I shared life with you when I could have survived and let you die. We're tied together in ways that you don't understand, that _I _might not understand now that I've put the Mark elsewhere and the tie is different. You can live like this, Harry. And so can I."

_If I have to._

Then, he was weary beyond weary, so he let the connection drift away and opened his eyes to his bedroom again. He was asleep before he could move out of the chair.


	4. The World Turned Upside Down

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four-The World Upside-Down_

Harry woke with his head resting on the table. He blinked and pushed his glasses up his nose, staring at his left hand for a long moment. Something strange had happened with it, he remembered that much. He remembered a voice speaking to him, and his determination to be free, and power traveling in and out of him as if he was a sieve through which sand had been poured-

And then memory returned and stomped him in the face the way that Malfoy had stomped on his nose in sixth year.

Harry shuddered and stood up so suddenly that the book nearest him went flying. It thumped to the floor just as Hermione opened the door of the library and blinked at him. "Harry? Are you all right?"

How was he supposed to answer her with his head full of thunder and light, full of the knowledge that he had nearly died opposing Malfoy, that he had tried to shatter Malfoy's soul, and that he had come back from that, not dying and with the Mark still on his arm-no, it would be on his shoulder now, he could feel the soft burn of it there-because of Malfoy?

It was impossible.

So Harry just said, "No, Hermione, I'm not all right," and brushed past her, running towards his room, hearing the solid thump of his feet on the stairs as though they belonged to someone else. He wasn't sure what he would do when he got to sanctuary, but throwing up and pounding the walls while screaming in frustration were both high on the list.

"Harry, I don't understand!" Hermione was following him, and her voice was pitched high with what Harry thought he recognized as fear, but after being away from her for so long, who could tell? She wasn't the same person, and neither was he. He was a lot Darker than his friends realized, to an extent that could hurt them if they did learn about it. "I want to help you, but you keep brushing me aside. What in the _world _did you do? What's happening to you? Does it have something to do with the medical magic that you're looking-"

Harry shut the door to his bedroom, shutting out the noise, and flung up a ward that he knew would take even Hermione some time to get through. Then he paused. His wand was humming lightly in his hand, and it felt as though some _blockage _had been cleared out of his veins, so that the power traveled more normally through him.

It had to be the result of his encounter with Malfoy.

Harry began to pace back and forth, faster and faster, until he was practically running around the room. He circled the bed, leaped the chairs, and dashed himself against the walls, ready to burst, ready to wear away some of the mad energy that battered through him.

He didn't _want _to owe his life to Malfoy. He didn't want to be Marked, even if it was on a less noticeable place than on his left arm. He didn't want to think that he had shoved that power at Malfoy, his free gift, his to do what he liked with, and he had given it back.

He _especially _didn't want to think about that part.

Oh, Harry could see Malfoy saving his life rather than letting him die. He had taken that option even when Harry had wounded several of his people and had shown that he would prefer to run himself to death rather than submit. But he couldn't see Malfoy giving up power. He had Marked Harry and the others because they were strong in their own right, strong in their magic, and commanding them and owning their lives was the next best option to having that power in his own body. He would never yield magic he didn't have to pay the price of a fractious subordinate for.

Or so Harry had thought.

He rather thought that he didn't believe that, now. Or that it had changed.

But he couldn't allow the change to matter, he told himself the next moment, fiercely. Because Malfoy still wanted surrender, and Harry would never allow that.

Someone pounded on his door. Harry turned around, neck bristling with startled hair, and raised his wand. It still moved differently in his hand, and Harry found himself wondering what Malfoy's wand would feel like. And that memory led back, like too many others lately, to the feel of Malfoy's hand wrapped around his cock, Malfoy's body moving against him.

_If I was strong, I would have found some way to resist him and still win the information I needed._

Shame occupied him enough that he didn't stop Hermione from undoing the ward in time. Then she stepped into his room and stared at him, and Harry discovered that it wasn't only Malfoy who could make him feel like a bug being watched.

"You need to tell me what's going on." Hermione's voice had a layer of steel, but on top she sounded so concerned that Harry thought she was going to cry. "_Please, _Harry. You're suffering, I can understand that much, but I can't do more without knowing more."

"Why do you need to know more?" Harry snapped, and found himself faced by a pair of large eyes so brilliant with astonishment that he squirmed and looked away.

"How can you ask that?" Hermione whispered. "I'm your friend, Harry. Ron's your friend. If something's happening to you, something we can help you fight or save you from, then of _course _we want to know about it."

Harry lowered his head and nodded. That truth still lay between them. He had thought virtuously that he wouldn't involve Ron and Hermione, but he had sheltered in their house, eaten their food, done his research among their books even as he thought that. He had depended on them to be there for him, and he couldn't do that and shut them out of the information loop at the same time.

It was time to tell them, no matter whether the full truth caused them to turn their faces away. Then, at least, Harry would _know _that they weren't his friends anymore, and he could leave with a clean conscience.

But he suspected they might stick by him. They _might_.

"Fine," he said. "When I broke away from Malfoy to come here-it was with the help of an artifact full of magic that he'd stolen. I didn't escape the way I told you, though. I went with Malfoy to torture Robards. He was the one who sent me to Fox Valley to die, and I wanted revenge against him."

Hermione watched him with shadowed eyes, but said nothing. Her wand had started twitching in her hand, however.

Harry watched it as he spoke. He owed his friends the truth, but he wasn't going to allow them to arrest him and keep him here, no matter what he had done. He'd made his choices. If he would fight for his freedom against Malfoy, he was certainly going to do so against the Ministry, who would never seek to own him in the way Malfoy would. "I ended up torturing Malfoy and killing Robards. I cast an Unforgivable Curse on Malfoy, too. Then I used the stolen magic to make a really powerful Portkey that would transport me between continents."

Hermione made a thick sound in the back of her throat, as though she was choking on bones. "Harry," she whispered. "Murder? Torture?"

"I'm not the person I was, Hermione," Harry said quietly. "I started learning Dark magic from the wizards I arrested, and some of them, I killed without bringing in, if their crimes were awful enough or I thought they might escape when they were taken to trial. I think you could all me a Dark wizard now. Or evil. Or corrupted. I don't know what the best choice of word is."

Hermione's gaze never wavered. "You murdered the Head Auror," she whispered in wonder. "I thought you revered him."

Harry shook his head. Trying to reconcile with his friends would never work if they insisted on seeing only the past versions of him. "I used to," he said. "But he played on my guilt over a case I worked, and he intended me to kill Malfoy or die trying. I was glad enough to see the end of him. I was the one who gave Malfoy the knowledge he needed to get into the Ministry, past the wards that might have caught him."

Hermione took a step away from him. Harry locked his hands behind his back and waited.

"Oh, Harry," Hermione said. "I see now-why you didn't tell us." She hesitated, then said in a rush, "But that doesn't explain why you were looking at the books of medical magic."

"I know," Harry said. "Malfoy's here in Australia. I surprised him the other day, searching magically for me. I must have managed to cut off the trail that would have led him to me, or he'd be here by now. But I surprised him again this afternoon, and he fought me. I tried to kill him by shattering his soul and then forcing so much magic down the link between us that it would destroy the Mark, which he said was linked to my core and my soul." He swallowed. The look on Hermione's face almost didn't bother him now, because it was only a pale reflection of the tumult that burst through his head and heart and veins. "He gave the magic back. He saved my life, and changed the Mark." His hand shook as he pulled up his shirt to show her the fox on his shoulder.

"This is too much," Hermione said, and sat down hard on the bed.

"Sorry," Harry said, which was hopelessly inadequate. But he had no words other than that. He watched her sit there, and she watched him as if he was going to attack.

"You need help," Hermione said. "You _are _becoming a Dark wizard, Harry, and that kind of magic is addictive. The more you use it, the more you want to use. It makes everything seem so simple, but when you start using those spells, they drain more of your power than ordinary spells do and they damage your magical core."

Harry snorted. The propaganda was familiar from the Ministry, but he had used enough spells that were categorized as Dark Arts by now to realize that that last part was a flagrant lie. "They don't damage your core, Hermione. That's a lie that the Ministry came up with a century or two ago, in hopes that people who wouldn't listen to moral reasons for avoiding the Dark Arts would listen to a practical, physical one."

Hermione half-twitched and held up her hand. Harry wondered if she was going to make some sort of sign against evil, the way he had heard that ignorant Muggles did. "Harry...that's not true."

"Scan my magical core," Harry said. "See if there's any damage to it."

Too late, he remembered that there probably would be, thanks to his duel with Malfoy, and opened his mouth to rescind the invitation. But Hermione had already performed the complex curlicue flourishes of the scanning spell and murmured the incantation. Then she leaned back to await the result, her face set in a frown so fierce Harry wondered if he would regret telling her.

_Not unless she betrays me or tries to keep me here._

The scanning spell felt like a bone-deep tickle. Harry set his face so he wouldn't laugh and made sure that his wand was near at hand. But then he remembered the light in his body and decided that he could probably hold Hermione in place with sheer wandless magic if she cast _Expelliarmus _on him.

The scanning spell gave a faint ring, and then a shining image appeared in front of Harry. It looked like a gold cylinder set with brass rings at top and bottom. The light that filled it would tell Harry or Hermione or anyone looking how much magic he retained. All the way to the brass rings at the top meant a healthy core; anywhere beneath the rings on the bottom would indicate severe damage. Harry was expecting a half-full cylinder at best, with the dark spots and gaps in the light that would reflect his wounds and the way Malfoy had patched him back together.

Instead, the whole thing shone full, up to the top, with some radiance spilling beyond the edges in a sparking mist that made Harry flinch, fearing it would light the room on fire, even though it was only an image.

Hermione went still, staring at the thing. Then she swiveled around and stared at him. Harry did his best to look calm and mysterious, even though he was astonished as she was and she probably knew it.

"See?" he added, because he had to say _something_. "I knew that it didn't damage anything in my magical core."

Hermione took a deep breath and seemed to come back to herself. "This has to be the result of the magic that you told me Malfoy gave back to you," she said. "I'm sure that if we actually looked at your core after you used a Dark Arts spell, we would see the damage."

Harry shrugged. "Fine. Wait a few hours and look again." He was confident that she would find nothing incriminating, since he had used the scanning spell himself in the past, right after casting a Dark spell, and seen no change. The Ministry's lies were, perhaps, lies told for a good reason, to stop the use of magic that would put a lot of people's lives in danger, but they still weren't true. "Anyway, we're getting away from the subject. So things have changed now, and things changed for me a long time ago. What are you going to do about it?"

"Think," Hermione flung back at him, getting up from the chair and waving her wand in a way that made the cylinder's image vanish. "You've given me so much to think about that I hardly know where to begin."

Harry paused, then bowed his head. "That's fair," he said. Things had altered for him in a riotous rush, but he knew Hermione hadn't had the same experience. Among other things, the revelation that Dark spells didn't automatically "corrupt" or "drain" him was old for him, and Hermione didn't have the close connection to Malfoy that the Mark implanted in Harry, so no reason to take him as seriously as Harry did.

Hermione flounced out the door. Harry crouched down in place on the floor and slowly blew out his breath.

_Well. Less positive than I'd hoped, more positive than I'd feared. It seems she and Ron aren't going to throw me out quite yet._

But they might fear him, and that might make them change their minds. Harry really didn't know what was going to happen next on that score.

He returned to the puzzle turning in the center of his mind, the changed Mark and the evidence of-well, no, not of good-will, but of a different personality than he had thought Malfoy had, because he had given the magic back instead of trying to keep it.

In the end, though, Harry kept running up against the same two conclusions. First, yes, Malfoy was different.

Second, _Harry _was not going to think about him any differently than he had before, as long as Malfoy stood in the way of his getting his freedom and getting away.

* * *

Draco opened his eyes and stretched his limbs. He had slept for several hours, by the great gilded clock on the wall, and had expected the usual, heavy grogginess that he got in his head when he did that.

But instead, light seemed to fill his limbs and propel him onto his feet. When he tried a step, his foot moved as if it would break into a dance on its own. And he felt smug and glorious in the way that he had once when he wore shimmering peacock colors and Lisa and Thalia both found themselves unable to take their eyes from him.

Draco paused. He knew the source of those changes, at least on the surface: the exchange of magic with Harry. It made sense that it would have strange effects, and that those effects would fade with time, as his body became used to the realigned magical reality between them.

And yet, he had experienced such things before when he had used stolen magic-granted, never after so intense a stealing-and they did not feel the same. He usually felt then as if he had eaten a heavy meal, not as if he wanted to run about in circles simply to use the energy.

Draco cast a scanning spell, and watched in disbelief as his full core hovered before him. There was no way it should have been full, after the magic he had poured into Harry. He leaned back against the bed and reconsidered, frowning. Perhaps the changes in his power level were severe enough to disrupt the scanning spell and make it show a false image of his core.

But numerous other scanning spells, which used different images and more complicated incantations, failed to show anything different. According to them all, he was in the best of health and the most full of power that he'd ever been. Draco stared at the last, fading image, a circle that blazed with purple light, and turned his wand over in his fingers, considering.

There was another possibility, one that he had heard of when he studied mirror magic and rejected out of hand, because it required the bending of basic physical laws as well as ordinary theory. On the other hand, he had developed a spell that would test for such a thing should it ever appear.

Heart feeling as if it beat right behind his teeth, Draco cast his developed spell.

The air around him turned crystalline, with a red flush behind that broke through the crystal like the coming of dawn. Draco ducked his head as the light flashed over him and broke against the far wall. He turned around, knowing what he should see, convinced that the pattern in his head would never match what was actually displayed there.

But it did. On the wall was a half-circle pattern of brilliant scarlet eyes, like the eyes on a peacock's tail, with slender golden lines connecting them to an orange dot in the middle. Draco had chosen primary colors when he created the spell, reckoning they would make a lot of sense for an event that violated the primary orders of nature.

Draco felt his heart fill the room now with its beat, and fill the world. If anyone outside Thylacine's Lair had known what had happened here, or cared, they would have understood the feeling of celebration that consumed him. He didn't resist the desire to dance, now, though he made it a vigorous, spinning circle of kicks instead of one of the waltzes that his mother had tried to teach him. It expressed his feelings much better.

He and Harry had done the impossible. Of course, as far as Draco knew, no one had ever created a test that consisted of both parties linking with complex magic, then one of them casting an even more complex Dark spell and giving his magic to the other, only to have the second one return the magic and change the bond that had connected them in the first place.

He and Harry had _created _magic, not simply changed it. It was as unlikely, as unique-as impossible-as destroying magic, but there it was. There it was. There was more energy humming through the Mark and the bond between them now, and doubtless through Harry's body, than either of them had begun with.

Draco, thinking as best as he could through the golden daze of excitement that filled him, doubted the effect would be permanent. It would fade, and he would feel ordinary once again. But he and Harry could duplicate it again. He would find a way to make sure that they could.

It only proved that they were stronger together than apart. And it proved that he would be a fool to let Harry go.

Draco pressed his knuckles to his mouth and forced himself to stop dancing. Someone might come to check on him and see. He had to think about this, about the longer implications for the future.

He remembered his revelation about Harry, the sheer _conviction _that he would rather die than be a slave, something Draco had never believed before. He had changed the Mark in response, but that was only a first step. They would both have to compromise. Harry would have to learn to bow to a rope around his neck, because the moment Draco loosened it, he knew Harry would vanish.

He had to be made to understand.

_Without the making, _Draco thought, his mind calming a bit as he contemplated the long task in front of him. _He cannot be forced. But he has to be coaxed along, because he'll never listen to me if I simply give him his freedom as a good-will gesture._

Yet the thought of those plans couldn't hold him for long. He turned and flung his mind back into exuberance, listening to the song in his veins, the way that his blood danced to that new music.

He and Harry had done something _new. _They had done something that Draco thought he could dedicate his stored magic, and his power, and his life, to. Here at last was a good reason for stealing the stored magic. If he hadn't done that, he could never have created the Mark, and that would have meant he'd never have made this discovery.

The joy had to touch Harry, too. Or it would once he understood what had happened. Draco could not imagine a halfway intelligent wizard whom the news _wouldn't _fascinate, and Harry was far more than halfway intelligent.

_Far more than that, _Draco thought, and his hand slipped down to his cock as he thought about it. Harry's passion in the battle, the way that he had given up his magic with a joyous laugh when he thought he would win freedom with it. Draco could not conceive of embracing death the way Harry had, but he could imagine what would happen when Harry turned that passion around and used it to hold on to life as hard.

Draco thought further, of Harry willing, aroused in his arms, intoxicated and dazzled by the power, using it by Draco's side, creating more of it, exulting in the magic and exalted by it, his green eyes so bright that Draco could see them burning on the far wall beside the telltale pattern, the-

Draco came with a gasp. The orgasm forced itself out of his body, given extra strength by magic and joy, and Draco collapsed on the bed. When he tried to sit up, he fell back again.

_Oh, Harry, _he thought, and closed his eyes, more than ready for another nap. With luck, he would dream of Harry. With even more luck, he would dream of a way to convince Harry to pursue what they had.

_And after all, is not my luck greater than that of any other wizard alive?_


	5. Breaking Natural Laws

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Breaking Natural Laws_

"I didn't know, mate."

Harry gave Ron a tight smile. They'd sat down for dinner together, but Hermione hadn't joined them. She'd brushed past with a sandwich and a stack of books two feet high in her arms, muttering something about eating in the library.

Harry took a bite of the fish that Ron had prepared and shook his head. "I wouldn't have expected you to know that I was a torturer and a murderer. I didn't come to you with that branded on my forehead, after all."

"No, but you came with a brand," Ron said. "I should have realized that that would change you." His eyes darted towards Harry's left arm and away again, although, if Hermione had really told him everything, Harry would have expected him to look at his shoulder instead.

"I didn't change because of the Mark," Harry said. "Because of my desperation to get away from Malfoy, perhaps. But I learned Dark spells and committed the mistakes that saw people dead before that, Ron."

His best friend put down his fork slowly. "I'm not hungry," he said.

Harry ate a few more bites, mostly to show he could, before he shoved his plate away and stared Ron in the eye. "Tell me what you need to feel comfortable around me again," he said.

"I don't _know_." Ron leaned back from him. Harry tried not to read that as a rejection, and waited. Ron curled his fingers into his palms and swallowed. "I never thought you would become a Dark wizard. Did it happen because we weren't there? Because the Ministry didn't appreciate your work the way they should have? Why?"

"Because I wanted enough power to stop Dark wizards," Harry said, "and to bring justice where I knew the Ministry wouldn't, either because of corruption or because they didn't have enough evidence."

Ron didn't look as though he knew whether to be sick or impressed. "You set yourself up as a vigilante," he said.

"Except no one knew," Harry said. "I was careful to keep the knowledge that I was learning Dark magic from the Ministry. Malfoy only knew because I tried to use it to escape from him. If I could have kept it from his notice, then I would have done that, too. It probably would have helped me escape him later," he added with some regret. Should he have yielded when Malfoy first tried to Mark him, lulled Malfoy into complacency, and _then _struck, killing the bastard?

Then he remembered, again, the complex spells that linked the Mark to his mind and soul. He shifted uneasily. He didn't know if he could actually have killed Malfoy, and it would have been awful to have a less brutal knowledge of how the Mark could control him when he finally went up against the bastard.

"Dark magic is Dark magic," Ron argued, but he turned his head away from Harry as though he didn't believe his own words. "You could have done something differently, found some other way to achieve your goals. Harry—you're a _Dark wizard._"

Harry ate a few more bites while he thought about that. Then he sighed and said, "Yeah, I reckon I am."

Ron snapped his head around and stared at him. "I can remember a time in school when you would rather have died than become one," he whispered.

Harry reached a hand across the table, but Ron didn't reach back to him, which made him feel stupid, so he dropped his hand to his side again. "Yes, but that was school," he said as gently as he could. "We've both changed since then."

"I haven't," Ron said. "Not that much."

"But you've changed to the point where you _have _to admit that it would be hard for us to stay exactly the way we were," Harry said. He wished he had better words. He wished, for the first and only time in his life, that he had become a politician the way so many people had expected him to after Auror training. He could use the practice in persuasive speeches he was sure he would have received. "I'm a Dark wizard. You're Hermione's husband and a fire-fighter. That's a change."

"You say it as though it was just another profession," Ron said, and then took the deep breath he had used right before confessing to Harry that he was going to ask Hermione to marry him. "That's what bothers me, mate. Not that you're a Dark wizard as much as the fact that you aren't _bothered _by it."

"I've had a chance to come to terms with it," Harry said cautiously. "And the things I did that are most horrible aren't the Dark spells. Or they aren't the result of Dark spells like the ones you're thinking of, at least. I still think murder is evil, even if I had only done it by stringing a Tripwire Jinx across some stairs and making Robards fall down them. I think the Mark had its part in turning me into a monster. I don't want to be one."

"But you'll accept the title of Dark wizard?" Ron's fingers writhed as though he was digging them into dirt.

"Dark wizards are different from monsters," Harry said, though his voice wavered a bit when Ron stared at him. "So, yes. And right now I have to call myself a monster, even, although I'm hoping to change that. But I can't change the fact that I know Dark magic, I've used it, and I would use it again if someone threatened my life and I felt frightened enough."

Ron bent forwards and rested his forehead against the backs of his hands. "We would be there for you," he whispered. "We _would_, mate. You could have called on us for help, instead of learning Dark magic."

"How often have we communicated in the last few years since you went to Australia?" Harry asked quietly.

"Um," Ron said. "A few?"

Harry nodded. "We grew more and more distant from each other's daily lives, and Auror work was my daily life. I had to learn spells that would be relevant to me then, not during the times between battles when I could think about Flooing you."

"But when you felt yourself slipping into the darkness—" Ron began.

_Silly, and endearing. _Harry held up a hand to stop him speaking. Ron did, but then gazed at him with such appealing eyes that Harry sighed.

"It wasn't like that," he said. "I had to make decisions in the heat of battle, and those decisions were sometimes ones that other people would have told me were wrong. But they weren't there; they didn't have to make the choices that would keep them alive. I was and I did. What should I have done, let myself die rather than learn or use one single spell that might have saved me?" His voice curdled at the end of that speech, and Ron winced.

"Chosen some other spell," Ron said firmly. "That's part of the problem with Dark magic. It takes you over, addicts you, until you only think of _it_. I'd bet that you could solve some of your problems with hexes we learned at Hogwarts, mate. You've always been clever and creative with spells that way. Not every curse we used during the war was an Unforgivable."

"But I did use them then," Harry said. "What makes my use of them to survive a battle with a Dark wizard so different? That was a war, and so is this."

Ron's face was green this time. "Not the same," he breathed. "The Death Eaters were fanatics, set on destroying you and people like you. Not all the Dark wizards you fought could have been that way. Some of them probably only wanted to brew or smuggle in peace."

Harry threw up his hands. "Now you sound as if you're defending them, which means you should be defending _me _if you consider me one of them." He pushed back from the table, his hunger destroyed by the words. "I did what I did. I'm not proud of it, and I want to keep from ever murdering anyone again. But I'm not going to spend the rest of my life apologizing for my choices. Especially when Malfoy's after me," he added, wondering if Ron had managed to forget that. "_He'll _make me regret it if I don't use my entire repertoire of spells and struggle to be free of him. And he'd have no compunction about using Dark magic against me. Some of those curses have no counter that the Ministry recognizes as legal."

Ron shifted restlessly in his seat. "I don't know how you know that," he muttered. "Or, rather, I can imagine, and none of it makes me particularly anxious to be around you."

Harry slammed a hand flat in the middle of the table. Ron leaped and stared at him as if the hand were a wand. With the power thrumming beneath his skin and still leaking up from his core, Harry thought dimly, it might as well be.

"So this is about me _losing my innocence, _is it?" he hissed. "You would prefer that I not know certain things and die than know them and save my life?" He shook his head, words brimming over in his mouth, heart right behind them. "Is Hermione _tainted _because she used Unforgivables during the war? Am I? Would the world be a better place if everyone knew that the incantation for the Cruciatus Curse had once existed but not what it was? I don't _understand, _Ron, because that's what you sound like you mean, but it's an incredibly _stupid _thing to sound like you mean."

Ron flushed deeply and stood tall to face him. "I still love you, Harry," he said with quiet force. "I still want to support you, and I want to see you free of Malfoy. I shudder to think what he'll do to you. But I fear even more what's going to happen to you as a result of this. Will you _never _go back to Britain again? It sounds like it, since you murdered Robards. Are you going to try to get help with your addiction to Dark magic? It doesn't sound like that. Maybe you think this is the only way to stay alive, but it's _not_." He paused, as though staring into a mirror, and then added, "And sooner or later, we all have to ask ourselves whether being alive is better than the alternative."

Harry laughed. It wasn't the reaction he wanted to have, not when Ron's face went from solemn to offended, but he couldn't help it. He ended with a choking gasp and wheeze, and shook his head.

"You're mad," he told Ron. "Really and actually mad. I faced that choice yesterday, and I picked death over slavery. It's not my fault that I returned, but Malfoy's, and I know so little about the magic he used that I don't even know whether it was Dark or not. So don't talk to me about the sacrifices one has to make and how you have to value some things more than your life. I know all about _that_."

Ron turned red, then white. "Yeah, I apologize, mate," he said. "I reckon you do, at that."

"Apology accepted," Harry said briskly. "Now, tell me. Do you think you'll be able to help me against Malfoy? Or do you want me to leave?"

"Are you going to keep using Dark magic?" Ron demanded.

Harry temporized. "I'll try not to use it here, unless it's the only way that I can keep from Malfoy from taking over my body and soul."

"The Australian Ministry has even more laws about the use of Dark magic than the British one," Ron said. "It's one reason we decided to live here, although Hermione also wanted to be close to her parents. We wanted to feel safe, and Britain wasn't that way anymore. Do something else like use the Soul-Severing Curse here, and we could get in a lot more trouble that we can't just flee. Do you understand, Harry? This is our _home_."

Harry nodded. He understood the value of the word, although he'd never had one, unless Hogwarts counted.

"I won't let you bring trouble down on us just when we're _finally _feeling settled in and safe," Ron continued, although his voice had softened a little, probably because of Harry's nod. "If we can help you against Malfoy, say the word. If you're going to be casting Dark spells, then we'll want you to leave before the sun sets that day."

Harry knew that his best friend would once never have said such things to him, but then, he once never would have expected his best friend to put up with him casting Dark magic. "I still need to decide how to fight him," he said calmly. "I'll let you know if you can help. And we might both need to wait and see what Hermione comes up with."

After a tense moment, Ron nodded. "She's saved us more than once," he muttered, slumping back into his chair as though Harry's declaration had stolen the tension from his body. "Maybe she can save us again."

Harry prudently kept silent about exactly what they might need to be "saved" from, and why. He went upstairs instead, and shut his bedroom door behind him, and stood still as he thought.

No matter where he went, Malfoy would be able to track him through the Mark. Harry thought the bond between them weaker now that the Mark had changed position, but that didn't mean it had lost its locative properties. And if he didn't know exactly where Ron and Hermione's house was, Harry imagined that he would learn soon.

So the solution wasn't to keep evading him, or to stay here forever. Instead, Harry needed to pick a battleground where he could face him and learn it well enough to use it as home ground before Malfoy caught up to him.

_You are thinking of flight, my Harry? That was once so unlike you._

Harry stiffened as the words sounded in his ear, practically a sigh, a whisper, a caress of breath. He swung around and stared at the walls, but of course they offered him no sign. Ron had said proudly that first night that wards were around the house that would alert them to the use of Dark magic, but they hadn't sounded when Harry cast the Soul-Severing Curse. Harry doubted they would sound now.

Reluctantly, he drew back his sleeve until he could see the Mark on his shoulder. Was it larger than before? Harry wasn't sure. He hated the mere sight of the stylized running fox so much that he didn't often look at it. Perhaps he should have.

_I was surprised when you ran from me in Britain. I will be more surprised if you run now. You know that we have more to talk about, Harry. Unfinished business that must make you as curious as it does me._

Harry gritted his teeth in loathing and responded, hoping that the curled-tongue emotion traveled along with his words. _The only thing I'm curious about is how far you'll pursue me before you give up._

_Oh. Well, you need not wonder. _A laugh like a wind in grass touched his ears, or his mind, or whatever part of him was actually hearing this. Harry didn't know, and that just made his teeth grind all the harder. _I will never stop pursuing you. I have your measure now. More stubborn than I dreamed, stronger than I knew, more wonderful than I can stand. I want you, Harry._

_ Yes, you've made that clear before. _Harry paced back and forth through the center of the room, muscles so tense that they hurt. He wondered why he wasn't simply cutting off contact with Malfoy, but hated to admit it was mostly because he didn't know how.

And perhaps he was curious. With the emotion buried somewhere beneath the hatred that Malfoy had more than earned.

_Not like this. _Malfoy's voice changed, dipping and dropping the layer of humor that had covered it before. _Oh, Harry. I took half your words as lies and the other half as exaggerations. I thought I knew you better than you knew yourself. Of course, with someone as consumed by guilt as easily as you are, while still practicing Dark magic and not feeling guilty about _that, _it was relatively easy to see you had no self-knowledge, _he added.

Harry ripped his head to the side, imagining that the words were like reins Malfoy was trying to fling around his head. If Malfoy still thought Harry could be harnessed and driven, he didn't know him at all, extraordinary claims to the contrary. _Get to the point._

_ I am. _Malfoy sent a bolt of pleasure through the Mark. Harry had hoped that the changing of the Mark's position might weaken that as it seemed to have weakened or changed their magical connection, but instead, the pleasure seemed to spread more evenly over his body this time, so that Harry staggered and nearly fell on the bed. He gritted his teeth against a sob this time, mostly of frustration at how _good _the bastard could make him feel. _The way I want you has changed. Now I know that you meant it when you said you wanted to be free. _

Harry's eyes snapped open, and he stared at the far wall, trying to reason his way through the complicated tangle of Malfoy's mind, and not getting anywhere. _So let me go._

_ How can I resist someone who wants so badly to be free, but who I might stand a chance of taming? _Malfoy responded instantly. _If I have you, willingly submitting to me, then I have something no one else in the world has. And I want you for deeper versions of the same reasons as before. Would you leave your wand lying on the ground after a battle and walk away from it? You have become as necessary to me as that._

Harry shook his head. _You might imagine that, Malfoy, but you have to be wrong._

_ Why? _From the sound of things, Malfoy might be settling in for a long chat. Harry gritted his teeth and glanced at the door to his rooms, wondering if the wards would have a delayed reaction and Hermione or Ron would come storming in at any moment. _I discovered something yesterday that ought to mean something even to _you_, who seem to care so little about power except as it can serve you. I discovered that we had created new magic when we exchanged our power—_

_ Yeah, that's one word for it, _Harry interrupted bitterly. He still hated the fact that his grand gesture, the choice he had made to die, had been thwarted by Malfoy.

_And now we both have more power than we had before, _Malfoy finished, with an edge in his tone that said he had at least heard Harry's words, though he might have decided to ignore them. _It won't fade or go back to normal. This is the new level of magic that's in your core, Harry, and I'm at least as strong._

The impact of what Malfoy was saying sank home at last, and Harry flinched. _You're mad, _he thought.

_Why? _Malfoy laughed softly into his ear. _It would be a stupid lie to tell you unless I was certain it was correct. But that is one reason I don't want to let you go. Who knows what else we can do, acting in concert?_

Harry shook his head. It wasn't—there was no _way _that what Malfoy was saying was true. He was weak in Potions theory, although his Auror trainers had done their best to correct that weakness, but he knew the basic theories of magic as well as anyone. No creation, no destruction. Magic transformed all the time, but it didn't fade away—only its effects did—and it didn't come into being.

Malfoy waited, seeming to give Harry time to deal with the incredible revelation. Except that it _wasn't _a revelation, Harry thought, irritated beyond measure that he had given Malfoy a handle with which to manipulate him, because it was a lie.

_Again, why would I lie? _Malfoy asked him. _I have plenty of other reasons to want to keep you, and I could simply have recited them. But this is something new, something that we must meet and discuss. _His voice thickened with lust, but Harry didn't think it was physical, more lust over possibilities, the way that Harry had sometimes felt when he was observing new Dark spells in play from a wizard he'd chased. _We need to talk about this._

Harry licked his lips. If there was the smallest chance that what Malfoy was saying was true, then yes, they did. But he needed to be the one to set the terms.

_I can let you have that, _Malfoy said to him, his voice suddenly grave and thoughtful. Harry knew better than to believe that, though. Malfoy would do whatever was most necessary to snare him.

_Well, yes, _Malfoy added then, as if he was a little insulted that it had taken Harry so long to realize that.

Harry took longer than he needed to to make the decision, staring thoughtfully out the window and waiting until the hiss of imaginary breath in his ear sounded impatient. Then he jerked his head down as if he was nodding and said, _Yes, I would like to meet you in a place that I'll pick out. I'll send the Apparition coordinates to you through this means of talking as soon as I've chosen it._

Because he had no idea yet, Malfoy could ransack his head all he liked and not find the coordinates, as he must have known. Malfoy growled at him and said, _As you will. If you delay too long, I will speak to you again._

_I'm trembling, _Harry said, before he felt Malfoy withdraw from his head. He opened his eyes and stared at the Mark on his shoulder again. It wasn't blazing, or tingling; the words they'd exchanged seemed to have no effect at all on it.

_Well._

Harry sucked thoughtfully at his lip and replayed the conversation in his memory. This was—intriguing. Malfoy had been his arrogant self during the conversation, but perhaps a touch less arrogant than he usually was. Harry might have actually been able to live with someone who sounded and reacted like this.

_Not that I should. _He smiled then, and he had the impression that Malfoy would have recoiled before his grin if he could have seen it. _If I have the choice of the ground and do enough research before we meet, then I should be able to find a way to fight him off once and for all._

If he was telling the truth. If this wasn't another stupid lie. Though, as he had said, Harry couldn't see the reason for it, if it was; Harry already knew that Malfoy wanted him and would go out of his way to capture him.

_If._

* * *

Draco leaned back in his chair and sighed, touching his left arm with a hand that shook. Sweat coated his forehead, and he felt nearly as tired as he had immediately after the battle with Harry.

He had concentrated as hard as he could during the exchange to avoid expressing emotions that would alienate Harry. He had bitten back response after response, remark after remark, joke after joke. He had used the plain truth as much as possible.

His lips and tongue bore the marks of his teeth, but it had worked. Harry was giving him a chance.

And, for now, that was all he wanted.

He was content to sit there for a time, alone with his thoughts. Satiety was a novel experience.


	6. Home Ground

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Home Ground_

Harry leaned back and stared hard at the ground he'd chosen, trying, for the sixtieth time in the past few hours, to estimate its weaknesses and strengths as a confrontation site for facing Malfoy.

It was a small, dusty hollow, dipping down into the ground perhaps seven feet, sheltered on either side by thorn trees that didn't look native. There was nothing to distinguish it from anything else in the bleak country where Ron and Hermione had chosen to plant their house, except that Harry had found it and noted that it had a strong, humming sensation about it. He hadn't been able to analyze it at first, but since then he had cast a few spells and thought he understood.

Now he used one more spell, closing his eyes and envisioning, as he often did when he used an incantation he had picked up during Auror work, the face of the witch he had stolen it from. Harry had brought her in for arrest, rather than letting her die during it; rotting in Azkaban with her wand broken was all she deserved, for the disembowelments she had used as her primary means of killing. "_Praescisco cognationes_," he whispered.

The ground in front of him lit with a dazzling yellow light, like an unflickering fire, though Harry knew that, even if anyone else had been nearby, he was still the only one who could have seen it. He wrenched his eyes open and watched the flames leap and soar, still higher, freezing when they formed a slender column of gold. Harry walked around it and studied its thickness, its base, and its shine.

Then he smiled. Yes. At some point in the past, someone had performed Dark magic here, magic that was congenial to the way that Harry worked. Of course, that might mean the place had some kinship to Malfoy as well, but Harry didn't think so. Malfoy seemed much more about using other people's magic, through the Marks and the artifacts he had created, rather than casting his own spells.

Harry shifted uneasily then, as he remembered the way Malfoy had altered the Mark and poured the magic back into him so he wouldn't die during their combat in the half-imaginary place between worlds.

_Yes. But he still had to use the magic I gave him to do that. He has little power of his own._

Reassured, Harry stepped back, behind one of the thorn trees, and then laid his hand along the Mark, flinching as he did so. The skin felt scarred beneath his fingers, and he'd had enough of scars to last for a lifetime.

He'd never called out to Malfoy before—he wouldn't be so insane—but when he really concentrated on the Mark, he found that his mind squirmed and bent into the required patterns naturally. Or unnaturally, if you wanted to look at the Mark as unnatural—and Harry did.

_Malfoy, _he said, and listened to his voice echo in silence down endless corridors before Malfoy's reply came to him, languid as a great cat's.

_Harry. Could I convince you to call me by my first name? I don't think your loathing would come through quite as strongly there._

Harry sneered. _You'll eat my loathing and like it, if I choose to feed it to you._

_ I have missed your defiance. _Malfoy's voice was no longer languid, but sharp in the way that Harry knew his erection must be. He shuddered. He hated knowing that Malfoy was aroused by him. Why would Malfoy want someone he had reason to hate and be exasperated with? _Yes, I take it that you have found a place._

_Yes. _Harry took a step back and fixed his eyes on the bottom of the bowl in the earth, making sure that he had a firm picture of it before he sent it to Malfoy. He felt the flicker of acknowledgment that was probably as close as Malfoy could come to a nod in this in-between state.

_Very well. I will be there in a few moments, Harry. We will be together again. _His voice was hard with longing.

Harry didn't bother responding, simply dropping his hand from the Mark, taking another step behind the trees, and bringing up the spells that he would need to the forefront of his mind. This had to be done quickly and precisely. On the other hand, it was a good reason for choosing the bowl in the earth the way he had.

Now he only had to hope that Malfoy didn't suspect a trap, or land looking for a fight. Harry was not sure he could best him, especially if he had brought along some of the bracelets he typically stored his stolen magic in. But he would have to try.

_Especially if I'm to have the freedom that matters more to me than anything else._

* * *

Draco knew it would be a trap, of course. With Harry, how could it be anything else? With one leg in a snare, he would be looking to snare the one who had done that to him. He couldn't envision the Mark as a circle where they might both meet in power and pleasure, where Draco was as confined as Harry was.

But he had to admit that Harry had done it very neatly. When he Apparated into the bowl that Harry had shown him, a net immediately settled around him, covering the surface of the bowl and weighing him down. Draco studied it and nodded. He could throw off the bonds that wrapped him if he tried hard enough—though it would take strength that Draco would prefer to save for the struggle with Harry—but the one that spread across the hollow from side to side was anchored on the earth and the trees. It would take him hours to work loose.

_Unless…_

Draco forced himself to remove his hand from the bracelet in his pocket. He had come to deal in good faith, to tame his wild beast with compassion and companionship. He wondered if Harry had the least idea how _lonely _he was, as someone powerful and Dark who had been feared or envied or worshipped by far too many people in Britain to have close friends. And the extra magic that their connection had added would only make things worse, not better.

"Harry?" he called, turning in several directions, although Harry's Mark had blazed at him almost instantly from behind one of the trees on the small hill above. "Was there something that you wanted to speak with me about?"

"Malfoy."

Draco hadn't realized what hearing that voice again would do to him. His cock rose so fast that he bit back a gasp of pain, and his nipples hardened to match it. He turned in the right direction, and Harry stepped out from behind a tree. He'd been rubbing at his shoulder, as if Draco's emotions through the Mark were hurtful, but he dropped his hand in an instant and stared down with a blank face.

Draco studied him hungrily. God, but Harry was beautiful. That hair was darker than he'd seen it before, or else he hadn't picked out all the colors last time. Those beautiful, wild eyes, with their shadows, made his balls ache. And all it took was imagining the way Harry's cock had looked, the first time he had seen him half-naked, and he had to bend at the waist in an effort not to come.

Something else was adding to his arousal, or so Draco managed to think through the haze that he was steadily burning off in his mind. The power that beat around Harry was the added magic that Draco had poured into his core. It answered the power that had come to him, arising out of nowhere, born from the collision of their wills and desires. They sang to each other on a level that was partially mental, partially magical, partially physical, and it made Draco _need _to fuck Harry, to hold him, to touch him.

Harry, from the way he swayed backwards as though against a cordon of ropes around the hollow, was feeling it, too. But he mastered it far faster than Draco had. Draco wondered if that was because he felt less—which Draco could not believe—or because he refused to acknowledge that he wanted it. He resumed the blank face and said, "You wanted to talk with me about things. Talk."

"If I can think," Draco said wryly, and swallowed his own saliva several times before he felt composed. Even then, it was best if he kept his eyes on Harry's and away from his groin. "Now. I invented a spell years ago that was meant to tell me if new magic was ever created around me. Some of the old books insist it's possible, but I didn't believe it. This time, the spell worked." Harry opened his mouth, doubtless to say that he wouldn't trust Draco's spell if Draco paid him, and Draco hastily added, "And you feel stronger than before, don't you? The benefits of having magic poured back into your core, or so it should be. But it hasn't gone away. You haven't got used to it, either."

Harry's head came back and up, and Draco ached again. God, he _wanted _Harry to look him in the eye that way, he _wanted _Harry to move towards him, brought by the cords of kinship stretching between them, unable to help himself, brought and tamed and trained and dragged—

"Get the _fuck _out of my head, Malfoy," Harry snarled, moving a step away. "I know that you can feel my emotions through the Mark and force me to feel what you do, but they're disgusting emotions."

"They're inspired by you," Draco said. "Are they really disgusting? You have no idea how much I want you, Harry." His voice was thick. He swallowed and shook his head. "Do you think I would show this much weakness to you, if I had a choice? Hardly. I want you and you can crush me with your refusal."

Harry sneered. "Have you been reading Muggle romance novels? That's hardly the sort of language that's likely to make me yield." Then he shook his head and visibly wrenched his attention back to the path they had been going down before. "Anyway, since you can read my thoughts when you want to, I don't believe you about that core business. You could have known I was still unsteady on my feet from our fight and made up that lie."

Draco smiled. "But you gave _me _greater strength, too. Allow me to demonstrate." He paused, then added courteously, "You may want to strengthen the spells over the hollow. I suspect I'll destroy them."

Harry sneered back at him. _God, his mouth is made for using, _Draco thought, and knew he was staring unabashedly, and didn't care. "You couldn't do such a thing unless you were using one of your bracelets."

Draco splayed his hand out in front of him, showing that his fingers were empty. "Strengthen them, Harry. It's fair warning. And it's also fair for you to accuse me of lying, after everything I've done and said to keep you, so feel my emotions now. I won't use one of the artifacts that I could. This is my own power." He tried to envision clarity and honesty flowing like a stream of clear water through the Mark.

Harry rubbed his shoulder again and stared down at him, teetering on the edge of doubt. Draco tried to keep as still and patient as he could. Harry invited him to dance on that same edge, he thought. He would take this trouble for no one else. He would conquer them or ignore them and go back to Britain. Either way, it would be done.

But there was no prize in the world like Harry, and for him, Draco was willing to take his time.

* * *

Malfoy was hard down there. It was _disgusting. _Harry didn't understand. How could Malfoy want someone who had tortured him and done his best to kill him? And if he despised weakness, why didn't he despise Harry for trying to commit suicide by draining his core?

But those questions didn't have answers. Malfoy was offering him one that did. Harry had to admit that he was curious to see how strong Malfoy was after this transfer of power between them. He took a step back and nodded sharply. Malfoy smiled up at him, then turned and faced the far side of the hollow. He closed his eyes.

Harry noticed that he didn't have his wand out. He was about to tell Malfoy that so he could remedy the defect when a blaze of pure white fire flowed out of Malfoy's hands and struck the far wall, roaring as it melted down sand into slag.

Harry stared. The fire didn't behave like ordinary fire; it flowed and splashed and dripped, like water, the drops sizzling when they touched the ground and then creating their own small streams instead of separate flames. Harry realized the noise was less than it should have been for a fire that large, too, and there was no sensation of heat, although he could see the sand turning into glass by now. Harry knew of no spell or class of spells that would produce flame like that, and while it was always possible that Malfoy had read books Harry didn't know existed, he didn't think so.

Besides, Malfoy wasn't using his wand, and if he had been able to perform wandless magic of this class and power before, Harry knew he would have used it.

Malfoy ended the fire with a simple movement of his fingers. Then he turned and looked up at Harry.

"You see?" he asked.

Harry nodded unwillingly. He did. Malfoy had most likely envisioned fire that behaved like that, which was why it had. It meant that he hadn't really used a spell at all, and so the power in his core _had _increased somehow.

Which was supposed to be impossible, at least without a corresponding drain on someone else. But Harry could attest to the fact that he was humming with more magic than usual, not less.

But there was another objection to be made, and so far as Harry was aware, Malfoy hadn't addressed it. He cleared his throat and shook his head. "If you can do that, why do you need me? You're powerful enough on your own to set your Marked ones free and get rid of all your artifacts and suffer no loss."

Malfoy's smile quirked the side of his lips up. "I'm afraid it's not that simple," he murmured. "My power is still limited by the limits of my body. If I get hungry or tired enough, then I'll collapse, and someone else could take me. I'm interested in allying with other people and becoming stronger than I am. I want no limits, if possible."

Harry made a thick sound in the back of his throat. "I should have known," he said. Then he pointed to the Mark on his shoulder, which had been burning with a low, simmering fire ever since Malfoy had appeared. "And this isn't what I would call the badge of an alliance, exactly."

"What would you call it, then?" Malfoy took a step forwards, his eyes locked on Harry, as though he assumed it would be easier to disrupt his containment spells from there. Or as though Harry would have a sudden change of heart.

"Enslavement," Harry said promptly. "You took no one willing. I think that makes you get off more on it."

Malfoy tossed back his head and laughed. The laughter set up sympathetic twinges in Harry's Mark and belly, and envious ones. He couldn't remember the last time he had laughed like that.

Malfoy calmed down to a chuckle in a moment, and shook his head. "Yes, you're right," he murmured. "But the weakness I despise is that which makes someone stop striving and fighting. Lisa gave up. I don't have any reason to offer her the kind of alliance that I'm offering you. Let me come up to you, Harry. The moved Mark is a connection, but not as strong as before. I can no longer send pain through it."

Harry stared down at him, eyes narrowed. "That's stupid," he said at last, when long moments of such staring still hadn't told him whether Malfoy was speaking the truth. "Why would you give up a weapon like that? And why would it be true when I can still sense your emotions?"

"I created the pain with magic," Malfoy said. "Thus the link to the magical core. But the Mark is only bound to our souls now. That means that you receive my emotions and whatever else normally flows through it."

It sounded plausible. But so had many of Malfoy's other lies. Harry shook his head. "Let me go, and we'll call it even. I won't try to destroy you, the way that I could." He didn't think he was boasting. If Malfoy had grown stronger, so had he.

Malfoy gave him a fascinated smile instead, the fires in his eyes burning low. "I want you too much," he said simply. "Yes, I want to persuade you to have a willing alliance with me. But if you won't, then a connection that you can't ignore is better than nothing."

"There's nothing I could offer you even if I allied with you," Harry said stiffly. He didn't understand this at all. Malfoy's lust for power, yes, all right, but he was having too much of a physical response to Harry, one that Harry hadn't seen him have with his other Marked ones. "You can use the others for power boosts. You can use the stored magic plus your own power to become the worst Dark Lord the world has ever seen."

"But I don't have a goal right now," Malfoy said, voice so soft that the crunching of his boots on the sand as he walked closer to Harry almost hid it. "That's what you taught me. I want to _direct _this power somewhere. What do you want, Harry? What can I help you get that you don't have right now? I would consider working with you privilege enough."

* * *

Harry froze in a way that he probably didn't notice, or at least he must not know how revealing it was, because he would have done something to hide it, Draco was sure. His eyes widened, and his hands twitched at his sides. Then he shook his head.

"You aren't going to catch me that easily, Malfoy," he said. "There's nothing I want to destroy, which seems to be your specialty."

"Really?" Draco asked in the light conversational tone that commanded Harry's greatest, if unwilling, interest, perhaps because it was so unlike what he expected from a Dark Lord who had captured him. "Not the Ministry, which condemned you? Not those in Britain who turned their backs on you, shunned you, made you feel as if you were a worthless piece of shite for making a mistake? Not the ones who call you a Dark wizard and make you feel that you can never return home?"

Harry flushed, and Draco caught a flash of anger through the Mark before he hid it, expertly. "The only one who hurt me personally is Robards," he said, "And he's dead. There's nothing else I _want_, Malfoy."

Draco nodded, conceding the point. "Not to destroy, then. But you would like a home, I think, somewhere where you could slow down and think, somewhere you could feel safe. I could make that for you."

"Not in Fox Valley," Harry said at once. "It's not—no."

"I understand," Draco said. "We could make a home here, if you wanted to stay close to your friends." He was watching, and so he saw Harry's flinch. _Who has hurt him? _Draco hardened further at the notion of hurting someone else because they had caused Harry pain, or holding Harry because he needed comfort, but he thought he kept the huskiness out of his voice. "Or elsewhere. It doesn't have to be in Britain."

"You know what I want?" Harry asked harshly, his voice ringing with a determination that said he thought he had something that would push Draco's attempts at comfort away forever.

Draco raised his eyebrows. "What?"

"I want a way to stop being a murderer," Harry said. "To stop being a Dark wizard. To stop feeling like shit when someone looks at me with wide eyes and insists that I would never do something like that, that they _knew _me better than that, that I would obviously have come to them for help or killed myself before I did anything so horrible." He ran his hand through his hair and began to pace back and forth. Draco didn't take his eyes from Harry and didn't want to try. The emotions were flowing faster and faster through the Mark, now, and he knew how it would end. They were close to a solution. "I want a way to look at myself and decide what I am, hero or villain or neither, and then lay down any magic that doesn't fit with the conception I choose. That's what I want." He swung and stared at Draco again, his eyes so beautiful in their desperation that Draco had to bend at the waist again. "And there's no way that you can give it to me, Malfoy," he finished, with a smug twang in his voice that Draco longed to hear vanish.

"That's where you're wrong," Draco said, when he thought he had control of his tone again. "Of course I can give you that."

Harry's eyes widened. Then he shook his head. "In return for whoring myself out to you, I suppose."

"No," Draco said softly. He had made a mistake; he could admit that now. He should have explained his new understanding in-depth to Harry first, and then made the offer of help. "I know that you would rather destroy yourself than submit to me. I had that pounded into my bones the last time we—communed. I want you alive, Harry, and if that means giving you what you want without getting everything I want, well, that's fine, as long as I get to have _something_. If you're alive, you can still make decisions and change your mind."

There was a long silence, while Harry carefully scanned his face and Draco tried to project as much honesty as he could.

"But how could I ever trust you?" Harry asked at last.

Draco felt light-headed. The solution had come to him in his dreams last night, but he hadn't imagined that he could propose it so soon, because he hadn't thought he would get Harry to listen so soon.

"You could Mark me," he said. "Something with the same effects and the same level of control over me that I have over you."

Harry fell back a step. His face had gone utterly still. Then he shook his head and croaked, "Malfoy—you're sick. I can't—no."

"Why not?" Draco edged forwards, wondering if Harry would let the net spells weaken so that Draco could spring out of the hollow and land next to him. Just one touch to that skin, just one embrace. That was all he would ask for.

"Because I can't enslave someone else," Harry snapped, his hair flying around his head as he shook it again. "No, I never will."

"It's not enslavement if I willingly choose it," Draco said. "I would even let the Mark go if I could trust you not to run away. But I don't think I can right now. That's the only reason you still bear it."

"_No_," Harry said, and then Apparated out. The spells holding Draco captive fell to pieces in the same moment, and he stood where he was, reaching towards Harry through the Mark. Nothing came back to him.

Draco smiled a little before he went back to Thylacine's Lair. The sound in Harry's voice was familiar to him—not the sound of someone reeling in utter horror and rejection, but the sound of someone being tempted beyond his limits.

The hook was set. Harry would be his.

And he would be Harry's, which Draco had to admit would not have been his first choice, but as a price, was far less than what he would have been willing to pay.


	7. Tilting

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven—Tilting_

"Harry? Are you there?"

Hermione's voice, Harry thought, and he should have predicted that she would come and knock on his door eventually. He had wondered if his revelations to Ron would move him away from his friends forever, but they hadn't ordered him out of the house yet, so he thought that was a good sign.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes. He'd lain back on the bed with his eyes shut, trying to decide what he should do about Malfoy, and he had nothing for it but a raging headache and a mouth that tasted as if he'd swallowed a batch of fuzzy paper. "Come in," he called, remembering just in time to lower the ward that had guarded the door.

Hermione stepped in and looked at him carefully. Harry looked back, hoping beyond hope that she had come up with some solution to save the day again. He didn't want to give in to Malfoy's offer.

_And why not? _asked a voice that sounded exactly like Malfoy's, except that the Mark didn't burn, so Harry knew it couldn't really be him speaking in Harry's head at the moment. _What would be so bad about giving him a Mark and evening the scales? If you can't be free of him anyway, then this is the second-best thing._

Harry threw the voice from him, so hard that he could almost hear it hitting a far wall. He wasn't going to give in and listen to it because he _would _be free of Malfoy. He would find a way to kill him, with Hermione and Ron's help or without it.

He tried not to remember what had happened the last time he had tried to kill Malfoy. There was no point in undermining his own confidence.

"I've looked up what I can," Hermione said quietly. "And from what I can tell, nothing like this has ever happened before."

Harry bit his lip to keep from snorting a bitter laugh. What would Hermione say if he told her that he and Malfoy had created magic together?

_Probably that it's dangerous and Dark, and we need to stop that right now._

Harry shuddered, less because of the imagined reaction than because he had thought the word "we" about both himself and Malfoy, and asked, "Is there anything _remotely _similar? Is there anything about the Dark Mark?" There had been a flood of books and articles about the Dark Mark in the years immediately after the war, he remembered, and it seemed likely that Malfoy would have based his fox Mark at least partially on Voldemort's work. Where else had he got the idea?

"There aren't as many books about it here as there are in Britain," Hermione admitted, sounding as though saying that her new home had imperfect libraries was a sin. "I can owl for some, but they'll take time to arrive."

_Time is what I don't have._ But Harry told himself a moment later that that was ridiculous. He thought Malfoy would be content to wait for months if he believed there was a chance of earning Harry's consent to share and create power at the end of it.

No, the contest against time was because of Harry's own brain, which, stupidly, insisted that he had to choose and choose _now _whether he would accept Malfoy's offer or build a defense against it. Because the more days that passed, the more he would reason away the objections and come to see the offer as forgivable.

He nodded to Hermione. "That's fine. I think it's our best choice." He hesitated, then plunged ahead, because if he was left with one tormenting uncertainty, his vulnerability to Malfoy's offer, he wanted to get another one out of the way. "Have you decided what you think about my magic yet?"

Hermione lowered her eyes. There was a tense silence. Color came and went on her face; emotions did the same thing. Harry waited, because he didn't have any idea what she would say, which was why he had asked the question in the first place.

"I don't like what you've done," Hermione said, in so neutral a tone that Harry wouldn't have believed she felt anything at all if not for the evidence on her face. "But—I can't condemn you only for that. You have the chance to change and continue the rest of your life without using a Dark spell again."

"What about if I have to do it to maintain my freedom and keep Malfoy away?" Harry asked. He didn't want to voice the question, really, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to keep what probably sounded like a simple promise to her if his life was in danger. "Or if it's a situation like the one during the war where the Unforgivable Curses are my best option?"

Hermione squinted hard at him. Harry looked back.

"You're exaggerating," Hermione said softly. "Joking. There aren't many times that situations like the ones during the war arise. I condoned what we did then only because we were saving more lives than our own."

Harry blinked. "You mean…if it saves one life it isn't right? Would it matter if I was saving someone else, like a victim who had been kidnapped, instead of myself?"

Hermione's nostrils flared. "You're twisting my words," she said. "I never said anything like that. But yes, Harry, I do think that you need to give up the use of Dark Arts and find another way to accomplish what you want to."

"They're not my favored tools," Harry said, although he remembered what he had done during his attempts to get away from Malfoy and wondered. "They're spells that I can use to fight, though, and I'm reluctant to lay them aside."

Hermione shook her head. "If we find a way to snap the Mark bond between you and Malfoy, then you won't need them."

Harry looked steadily at her. "You think that there won't ever be another time in my life when they could defend me?"

"You can avoid that," Hermione said. "You could work for the Australian Ministry as something other than an Auror. Or open a shop. Or become an artist." She ignored Harry's mutter about how he had no talent at any art that mattered. "The war is _over, _Harry. Becoming an Auror was another way to continue fighting it, perhaps, but it doesn't matter now. Let it go. Become innocent again."

Harry studied her for a few moments without replying. This time, she seemed to have found a position that suited her. She beamed at him as if it should suit him, too, and only started looking a bit nervous when the silence stretched between them and she realized that he hadn't agreed.

"Harry?" she asked.

"Both you and Ron keep harping on innocence," Harry said. "_Knowing _these spells doesn't make me evil. If anything did, using them would. I don't know what you think will happen if I do settle down and get myself a different life, and if I'm so lucky that no one ever tries to kill or capture me again. The spells won't vanish from my mind. Or should I use a Memory Charm to remove the incantations?"

Hermione turned abruptly away and thumped a hand against the wall. Harry blinked, impressed despite himself. He didn't think he'd ever seen her take out violence on a defenseless object except during sixth year when she was arguing with Ron so intensively about his relationship with Lavender.

"I'm doing my best to understand," she said, staring at him over her shoulder. "But you're throwing my words back in my face. You're acting as if I want to cast you out of the house, which I _don't_. But you have to _let _me help you, Harry. It'll do no good if you poke holes in all the ideas I come up with because they don't suit your imaginary idea of what someone who helps you should be like."

After a moment when the tension between them seemed to shimmer like heat, Harry held up a hand in apology. Hermione hesitated, then sat down on the bed again. Harry waited until he was sure she wasn't going anywhere before he chose his words.

"I don't have a choice about using Dark spells, Hermione, because Malfoy will never stop coming after me even if we break the Mark bond. He might not be able to track me, but he'll search for me. And if I kill him or defend myself against him, Dark Arts spells are what I'll have to use. They're certainly what he'll use against me," he added bitterly, thinking of the way that Malfoy had sent the pain of a Cruciatus, or worse, casually through the Mark when they were still in Fox Valley.

Hermione studied him earnestly. "Do you think that you could put aside the spells after that?" she asked. "If defending yourself against Malfoy is the last thing you'll ever have to do?"

"Probably not," Harry admitted. He hated the way her mouth immediately drooped, but he couldn't lie to her. "I'm sorry if you feel like I'm throwing your words back in your face," he told her. "But this is permanent for me. I can't give up what I learned because it makes someone else uncomfortable."

"Dark Arts are a corruption," Hermione said, sitting up. "It makes me more than uncomfortable. It makes you Dark, Harry."

"Surely it depends on what I do with them?" Harry asked. "If I used a Blasting Curse to knock someone off a ledge to his death, is that so much better than killing him with the Killing Curse? But the Blasting Curse is perfectly legal."

Hermione clenched her hands. "I'm not engaging in a philosophical debate," she said. "I'll find material on the Dark Mark and see if we can break the bond. Then Ron and I can help you emigrate if you don't want to stay here."

Harry nodded slowly. From the note in her voice, she was stretching herself to her utmost for him, and he couldn't ask for more. "All right. Thanks."

"I don't want you using any more Dark Arts while you stay in the house," Hermione went on, standing up and turning around to stare at him as though she assumed he would snatch his wand out the moment she wasn't looking to cast the Imperius Curse. "Ron is right that it could get us arrested."

Harry nodded and did his best expression of sincerity. In fact, he _didn't _want to get his friends in trouble; he just wanted a way out of this mess, and he wasn't willing to surrender one of the best weapons so they could be more comfortable.

"I won't use them in the house," he said. All his confrontations with Malfoy would take place away from the house anyway, or else in that strange half-world that the Mark stretching between them created.

Hermione stabbed him with a glance as though she could hear the ambiguity in his words, but didn't know what to do about it. Then she turned around, with a snort, and slipped through the door of his bedroom.

Harry closed it and was left, as he had been before, alone with his thoughts.

And the decision he had to make.

Was Marking Malfoy enough compensation for what the bastard had inflicted on him?

Harry shook his head. No. In the end, even if Malfoy removed the fox Mark and the only one that remained was whatever Mark Harry chose to put on Malfoy's skin, it was still a connection between them, a link. Harry wanted nothing more than to escape into the distance and never feel Malfoy's touch again, never hear him speaking in his head again.

_Don't say that, my Harry. There's nothing I want more than you, after all._

Harry stiffened, then forced himself to relax. _The answer is no, Malfoy. You claimed to understand why I rebelled against you? Well, understand this. There's no way that you're getting anything else from me—not surrender, not attention, not magic. Be satisfied with what you have, and remove the Mark._

Malfoy laughed in his head, and it sounded half-rueful. _That's not the way things work for me, Harry. I will always want more. I will always be unsatisfied. I will always ask and hunger and devour what I can. It's sweet of you to want to spare me that, really, but it's useless. When we create magic, I'll want more. When I spend time with you, I'll want more. When you say or do something defiant, it makes me _ache.

Harry felt himself flush. He really didn't understand how or why Malfoy got turned on being rejected by someone he wanted. Harry was fairly sure that he would take the hint gracefully and go away rather than continually pressing his attentions on someone who didn't respond to them.

_That's a lie, _Malfoy said lazily. _You might be less persistent than I am, but you understand the appeal of having someone who challenges you. In this case, the challenge that you present to me is a little different from the norm, but I still want you, and you still don't want me to have you. And that's enough._

_ Then surely you'll get bored the moment you _could _have me, _Harry said, desperate to grab onto an argument that Malfoy might actually listen to. _I wouldn't be a challenge to you forever. I might give in out of simple exhaustion._

_ I've seen your soul, now. No, you won't._

_ But it doesn't invalidate the claim that you might get bored of me. _Harry held his breath and waited for the response. Malfoy had to know that he was telling the truth, with his access to Harry's mind through the Mark. And he had to know that Harry wanted this as much for Malfoy as for himself. He didn't want to become the possession of someone who would be even more thoughtless and cruel than he usually was because of boredom.

_Harry. _Harry felt as though a hand had reached out and stroked through his hair, insofar as that was possible with words. _I won't get bored of you. You underestimate both your own interest and your own value. You're a rare and shining gemstone. I would never want to destroy that quality._

Harry clenched his teeth. _Let me go, Malfoy. _

_ I never will. Let me have you._

_ I never will._

_ Then we have an impasse. _Malfoy's voice changed, becoming brisker. That made Harry relax a bit. He didn't like dealing with Malfoy's open lust for him. _And I've suggested a way to break the impasse. Put a Mark on me. I could release the one that you bear if I had your assurance that you wouldn't run._

_ I saw through your ploy, _Harry retorted bitterly. Did Malfoy think he was _stupid? You only want a link of some kind between us, so that you can make sure you always have a finger in my life. Thanks, but no thanks. Ultimately, I have to choose between my freedom and the magic that you have on offer, and the magic isn't enough to tempt me. Power never was._

_ An oath, then, _Malfoy said, undaunted. _If you won't put a Mark on me—which I understand you might have ethical objections about—then promise me not to run away, but to meet with me in a neutral location. You can ward the location if you want so that I can't simply use spells to overcome you. But meet with me. Talk with me. This is something _unprecedented, _Harry. You can't ignore it._

There it was again, the shiver of temptation in Harry's gut. Because—as much as pure power for its own sake didn't tempt him—being near something new and life-changing did, the same way going to Hogwarts when he was eleven had. He certainly had nothing in his life right now that could compare to it, with his career, his position in the Ministry, and his home gone, and his friends possibly drifting away from him.

But how could he possibly trust that longing for this new thing, when he would have to cooperate with _Malfoy_ to have it?

The simple answer was that he couldn't. He would have to continue resisting Malfoy and hope it would be enough.

_It won't. _Malfoy had tracked his thoughts expertly, and responded with a depth of feeling in his voice that Harry hadn't heard before, because it wasn't anger or exasperation. _You know it won't. You don't have anywhere else to go, no close bonds that can sustain you in the face of a claim like mine. It might be different if you did. You could go to those people and they would shelter you and reassure you that you aren't the monster you paint yourself as._

_ I don't think of myself as a monster, _Harry snapped back reflexively.

Malfoy might not have heard him. _You're a Dark wizard. You claim that title, because you can't deny reality, but you're guilty for it—and finally tired of the endless guilt, I think. Help me with the magic, and I think we can use it to create a spell that would show you objective reality. Perhaps working with a Pensive? Or the mirror magic that I've already used to such great effect. You could decide what you wanted to do with your life better when your mind isn't clouded with all these abstract moral judgments about yourself that no one applies with as much force as you._

_ I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, _Harry snapped. He knew that he couldn't listen, or he would go mad. That had to be true. What Malfoy held out to him was only a shining fruit that concealed the poison within. _I'm glad to be the person I am._

_ No, you're not. Either you want to be a Dark wizard free and clear, without apologizing for it, or you want to be pure again. I can help you with either, but you can't remain in this in-between state for the rest of your life. Nor can we remain at an impasse._

Harry felt more hunted than he had when Malfoy seized him through the Mark. _There's no way to get away from you, is there?_

_No. _Malfoy was unabashed. _But you can have the connection of your own free will, by making the oath, and then I would release the Mark._

_ Why?_

_ I would have no more need of it. _Malfoy sounded puzzled. _I can't control you with it and I can't find you with it, now that our powers are equal. The only value it has right now is as a fishing line. _

_ You could still try to seduce me through it._

_I can try to seduce you without it, too. _Malfoy laughed, the sound sparking up and down Harry's mind as though someone had built a ladder of fire out of his thoughts. _And I think I prefer the challenge that would come if I gave you the chance to escape and then reeled you back._

Harry thought about that, but he couldn't find anything other than honesty in the words. Malfoy was arrogant enough to believe that he could seduce Harry once he removed the Mark, and arrogant enough to believe that Harry wanted to be seduced.

Harry wondered if he could create the same kind of magic away from Malfoy, but he doubted it even before Malfoy's silent laughter echoed through his head. If he wanted that future at all, then he would have to—

_Trust you? Don't make me laugh._

_ You can trust me to accept your oath, and I can trust you to keep it, _Malfoy said.

_I'll make it conditional if I make it, _Harry said. _I won't believe that you'll remove the Mark until I see it flying away from me._

_ Of course._

Something about the tones beneath the surface of his voice made Harry turn his head and focus sharply in the direction that he thought Malfoy was standing, although since they were speaking mentally, directions probably didn't mean much anyway. _You _can _remove it, can't you? I thought you told me once that it would persist even if you died._

_ I certainly never thought that I would think about freeing one of my Marked ones of my own free will, no._

_ That's not an answer._

_ I haven't done it before. That is one. _Malfoy's pride bled through the statement and made it dance and shimmer like a flame in Harry's imagination, abruptly quenched by Harry's own doubt. Malfoy snarled. _I will make a go of it. If you'd like, you can think about my fascination with challenges and see that I would hardly allow a Mark to defeat me, if I would not allow you to do so._

Harry snorted. _I don't feel like making an oath until you remove the Mark._

_ Then the Mark stays. I already told you that the oath was a condition that had to come first, and from what you said when you tried to bargain with me about it, I had thought you understood that._

Harry clenched his fists. He hated the idea of making an oath to Malfoy that would bind him for the rest of his life. Yes, it was an invisible bond instead of a physical one, but that kind could still destroy lives. He'd seen that much with Snape and the Unbreakable Vows that had sent him hurtling to his doom.

_Neither of us is blinded by years of bitterness and hatred, as happened to Severus. _Malfoy's voice was unexpectedly gentle. _We have time to turn aside._

_ From everything, _Harry thought back to him, making his thoughts as emphatic as possible. _Including this obsession that you have with me. You could let me go, and no one would notice or care. I wouldn't tell anyone that you let me go and ruin your reputation as a skilled murderer, unless you want me to._

_ The situation isn't ideal. _Malfoy remained so serene that Harry thought he had probably decided to just ignore the salvo Harry had fired at him. _You don't have the unlimited freedom that you would like, and I don't have you as my willing slave. But we compromise._

_ Why should I compromise with someone who was willing to control me for the rest of my life?_

_ Because you have no choice, and the Mark will remain as long as you delay._

Harry ground his teeth so hard that one slipped and cut into his tongue. He grunted and touched his face, running a hand along his jaw and into his mouth. No blood came from the cut, but it would hurt like acid for a few minutes.

He wished the world was different. He wished that Ron and Hermione had never moved to Australia and he'd had their support against Malfoy. He wished that he had managed to get away from Malfoy in Fox Valley, or that he'd succeeded in dying when he began to drain his magical core and give the power to Malfoy.

_The world isn't fair, _Malfoy said. _But if we work together, then you might eventually have what you want._

_ Not if you're involved._

He received a wordless ripple that he reckoned constituted a shrug as well as anything could in this sightless environment.

Harry spent a few more moments considering. If Malfoy felt any impatience, he was concealing it well.

_What kind of oath do you want me to make? _he asked at last.

* * *

Draco kept his elation out of his voice as he responded, _Swear on your magic and your blood. You can't break the oath without bleeding out, in both your body and your magic. Swear to meet with me and work on the magic until such time as we know how to do it separately._

_ But you must remove the Mark._

_ Yes. I'll swear that, too. In fact, I'll go first: I swear on my magic and my blood to remove the Fox Mark on Harry Potter's shoulder, no matter how long it may take._

It took time, but Harry slowly gave his oath. Draco leaned back on the bed and released the connection between them without responding, because he thought his response would distress Harry.

He had meant everything he said. He wanted to seduce Harry and he wanted to remove the Mark and he wanted to work on the magic. He would only get what he really wanted by surrendering a lesser desire, the rope around Harry's neck. It had to go, now. He comprehended that.

For a chance to have the glory that such power promised…

For that, he would give up so much that he didn't think Harry could understand, because Harry had never thought of him as selfless.


	8. At the Dawn

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—At the Dawn_

_You made a mistake._

Harry grimaced and rolled over in bed, staring at the ceiling again. He'd gone directly to sleep after his conversation with Malfoy yesterday, even if it meant that he wouldn't be able to sleep much the next night. He simply didn't want to deal with his guilt or the thousand second thoughts that he knew were going to plague him. He dug his fingers into his sheets and huffed out a small gust of breath.

This voice in his head now wasn't Malfoy's, because Malfoy wouldn't have tried to convince him that his oath was a mistake. It was the voice of his conscience, the same one that had condemned him when he made a mistake on an Auror case that took two lives, the same one that tried and convicted him of complicity in killing Robards and torturing Malfoy.

But as he lay there, with the usual litany pouring through his head and his thoughts running in multiple directions, Harry decided one thing. He was _tired _of the guilt. Malfoy was right about that much. It would have been useful if it had served to keep him from making mistakes again, but it didn't. He had done something arguably worse than his first crime not long after the first one happened. At least killing those two people in the fire had been, at bottom, an accident, not a deliberate act.

And what would happen if he spent the rest of his life tormenting himself about using Dark Arts? Would that keep him from reaching for one of those spells if his life was in danger?

_Absolutely not._

Harry ran his tongue along the edge of his teeth, and then grimaced and cast a charm that should freshen his breath. He was irritated with himself, with his friends, with the world, with Malfoy. But now that Malfoy had told him the way that _he _saw Harry's actions, Harry discovered that he couldn't unsee it.

_I can't trust everything Malfoy says. He's trying to get me into his bed. He would say anything and everything that he thought would accomplish that._

But he remembered that Malfoy had been baffled by Harry's guilt over the fire from his first days in Fox Valley, and he hadn't once acted as if he thought that murdering Robards was worthy of a punishment.

That really _was _the way Malfoy thought and felt. The accident was an accident, to him, and killing Robards was revenge. Neither was worth spending the rest of his life in mourning.

Harry gave a sudden, small smile. _I don't think Malfoy would know what spending the rest of his life in mourning meant._

_ Did you think of me, my Harry? I can feel you when you do that._

Harry clenched his fists together. The responding surge of adrenaline in his blood felt absurdly good. He tried not to think of that as he bent his mind sternly against Malfoy. _Did you make any progress on a way to destroy the Mark?_

_I have come up with ways to weaken it. _Malfoy didn't have any emotion in his voice for a moment, though Harry thought that was partially because he paused as if to let some impact sink in. Then he continued, _But to come up with a way to remove it completely without you dying, I need to touch it._

_ You can do that from this distance. _Harry reached up and let his hand hover over the Mark. He wasn't about to remove his shirt so he could see it. He simply had no interest in doing so.

_Not—as such, _Malfoy said. _I need to touch it physically. I need you to meet with me._

_ How do I know this isn't a trap to trick me into surrendering? _Harry rose to prowl around the room. His body, his head, both were restless. Small jerks and twitches assaulted his muscles in the way that they assaulted his thoughts.

_I swore an oath that I would remove the Mark, _Malfoy said patiently. _Since you'll go on resenting me and wanting to escape until I do so, it would be best for all of us if I did it quickly._

Harry tilted his head in reluctant agreement. He could understand what Malfoy was saying; he just didn't think those were the only motivations that the bastard had. _I pick the time and place, _he said.

_Of course, _Malfoy murmured. _Among other things, I have no idea what your schedule of eating with, talking with, and accepting moral punishment from your friends is, so I don't know how to plan around that._

Harry drew in a thick breath, and then released it in what wasn't a growl, but only because he thought that might be a bit undignified. _They're not punishing me._

_ From what I can feel from you, they're making you uncomfortable, _Malfoy said calmly. _And you haven't said anything about their standing with you to oppose me, and there's no indication that they know what sort of bargain we've made. I could be wrong; it's been known to happen before. Not often—_

_ Your arrogance is so hard it could cut diamonds._

Malfoy laughed. _I'm glad to have you around, so that you can tell me when I might sound arrogant to someone else. I honestly don't notice, most of the time._

The truth, Harry thought in gloom, was that he probably didn't. And he did sound genuinely _excited _about having someone around to correct him. Things like that would make it hard for Harry to hate him, although he knew it was necessary that he do so.

_Am I wrong about your friends? _Malfoy's voice had the ring of curiosity in it now, no more.

But Harry could never trust that. He said, _Hermione's researching ways to help me get rid of the Mark. They both know more than you think they do._

_ And about our bargain? _

Harry said nothing. It had never even occurred to him to speak to Ron and Hermione about that, and he was wondering now why it hadn't. Could Malfoy implant some sort of command in his mind that would keep him silent on that subject, at least for as long as he wore the Mark?

_Where do you want to meet?_ Apparently Malfoy would let the topic go if he found no interesting baiting material in it.

_I'll have to think about it, _Harry said. _But definitely not here. Using Dark Arts around the house could get Ron and Hermione into trouble with the Australian Ministry._

_ Of course that's the only reason. _Malfoy's voice was loud and merry in Harry's head. _Very well, think about it. I'll continue experimenting, but as I said, I don't think I can go further until—_

_ Until you've touched me, right, _Harry snapped. _I understood that the first time. You don't need to keep repeating it._

There was a long pause, and then Malfoy spoke in a slow, gentle way, as though he was trying to soothe a child who was afraid of the dark to sleep. _I didn't say anything about touching you. I said something about touching the Mark, yes. Interesting that you would equate the two, or think that I was._

Harry snarled in Malfoy's direction and shut down a wall across his thoughts as firmly as he could. Then he put his head in his hands and breathed for a few moments. He wondered if he could put up with Malfoy even for as long as it would take to remove the Mark, never mind the length of time that creating magic together would take.

Then he shook his head. He'd already sworn the oath, so he was committed to put in that time whether or not he wanted to.

Gradually, his heart calmed, and he remembered something else Malfoy had said—not in this most recent conversation, but before, in the conversations that Harry still remembered with a flinch and a shaking head. He had said that they could work on creating a haven from guilt, where Harry could make himself into someone who wasn't a monster, or at least not a monster for his use of Dark Arts.

_I want that, _Harry thought, with a sudden sharp longing that went in under his heart like a shard of bone. _I'm so tired of this bloody guilt._

He thought of having breakfast, but the pain was doing its work. He left the house instead, to search for a place where he could meet Malfoy.

* * *

Draco leaned back and studied the shimmering map in front of him, then spun his wand. The image spun in response, turning around like a young witch who wanted everyone at the ball to admire her gown.

Yes. This was the best he could do without touching the Mark, which he knew would have to wait because of Harry's scruples.

The image in front of him was a stylized running fox, like the Mark, with its tail raised high and its legs lunging forwards as if it was eager to reach a faraway destination. Draco could see constant, tiny glowing lights strung throughout it. The lights represented the points of magic and connection that he had built into the Mark, points that were meant to keep him and his Marked ones linked even if someone took steps to weaken the bonds.

He had built the Mark almost too well, he thought ruefully. He had not been able to comprehend why he should ever wish to loosen the bond, and so he had looped in protection spells, binding spells, and spells to lull the unwary Marked one into satisfaction with their slavery, not to mention the original binding to magic and soul, and the hexes that ensured that the Marked ones couldn't reach out and hurt _him _through the brand.

Even now, his fingers twitched on his wand when he thought about destroying such intricate, beautiful work. But then he listened to the swish of the blood in his ears and felt the magic dancing in his veins, and remembered that he would lose them both if he violated his oath. Especially given the power that would come to him when Harry finally conquered the last stages of his reluctance and let himself be with Draco, he had no trouble surrendering the Mark. It was smaller and weaker than the tidal wave he knew he could ride.

If he was careful. If Harry was biddable. Draco could readily imagine—though he didn't know if Harry could—the destruction they would unleash if the newly-created magic got out of hand.

_He must be biddable. And he will let me touch him._

Draco closed his eyes. It had happened several times now, but he had never learned to like the sensation of all the blood rushing from his face to his crotch. He reached down and pressed the heel of his hand tauntingly, teasingly, against himself. He didn't want to wank again until after he had touched Harry and gained new material for several fantasies.

Though, from the way his cock twitched in his pants, he didn't know if he would be able to restrain himself. In fact, one could say something about the satisfaction of a good wank _now, _so that he would go into the negotiation with Harry crystal-minded and undistracted by petty physical needs. Draco traced one hand around himself and turned to stagger towards the bed.

_Malfoy._

Draco twisted around, although he knew that Harry was not in the room. Listening to that voice in his head somewhat calmed the throb of his cock. He knew that would get to touch soon, and reality was better than a fantasy. _Yes?_

_ I found a place._

Draco licked his lips, and then shut them, to keep the saliva from spilling down his chin. It was hard to concentrate on a thought and then shape it so that it would travel down the connection to Harry instead of remaining in Draco's own head. Strange, Draco thought, but Harry seemed less skilled in reading Draco's thoughts than Draco was in reading his. But it probably had as much to do with reluctance to explore the bond between them as anything else.

_Where?_

* * *

Harry looked up from the food in front of him, which he didn't want but had ordered because sitting in a Muggle restaurant without ordering any would probably irritate someone, and saw Malfoy standing in the doorway.

Even though Harry had clearly told Malfoy what kind of place he would be coming to when he gave him the Apparition coordinates, the bastard still paused in the middle of the doorway and scanned the room slowly, as if he couldn't believe it. A few people stared at him; then more did. Malfoy raised his eyebrows, nodded at no one in particular, and strode up to the table where Harry sat.

"I find your sense of humor juvenile," he told Harry, and sat down across from him, studying him with a gaze so intense that Harry almost raised a hand to his shoulder, expecting to find lines of blood scored there.

"Really," Harry said. "I thought it would give us some pleasant neutral ground." _And keep you from trying too much, _he didn't say or "say," but he was sure Malfoy was thinking about that. He wouldn't want to go too far with Harry in front of a crowd.

Malfoy opened his mouth to answer, but was interrupted by the waiter who bustled up to them, long black hair hanging over his shoulder in a tail. "What do you want?" he snapped, and then sighed and stared at the ceiling. Harry would have put that down to him being an arsehole, most of the time, but given the young age in his face, was more inclined to put it down to him being a teenager.

Malfoy turned his head and gave the boy a freezing glance. He was good. In less than a second the boy stopped paying attention to the ceiling; in two he'd stumbled back from the table, looking as though he was going to vomit.

"A quiet meeting with my friend," Malfoy said.

"Right," the boy said, and scrambled away. More people stared at them. Then Malfoy aimed his glare in their direction, and they didn't.

Harry rolled his eyes. "We're going to be watched for the rest of our time here," he muttered, and picked again at the food. It was red, and messy. Harry wasn't entirely sure what it was; the same boy had served him, and he'd nodded at some random item to get him to go away as soon as possible.

"As though Muggles matter," Malfoy said, leaning closer, but his eyes burned, belying the causal tone. "Were you really afraid that I might try to—rape you, Harry? Is that what you imagined?"

"You said that you needed to touch the Mark," Harry said evenly. "Not me. I wanted to bring you to a place that would preserve the distinction."

Malfoy showed his teeth. Harry would have had to lay even odds on whether or not it was a smile. _Hard to tell. _"You've thought this out well," he said, which made Harry blink, because he hadn't expected a compliment, even in the biting tone that Malfoy used to give it. "Am I going to be permitted to _see _the Mark, at least?"

Harry pulled back his shirt sleeve from his shoulder, and Malfoy reached across the table and laid his palm flat on the Mark before Harry could give him permission.

Harry felt his face heat even further. Everyone really _was _staring at them now—he'd been exaggerating when he first said that, in the futile hope that he could make Malfoy back away from him out of embarrassment—and he hated it. It reminded him of the days when his name was still well-known and people thought just making eye contact with him would someday be a precious memory. He tried to pull back.

"Shhhh," Malfoy murmured. His eyes were half-closed, and he had an odd expression on his face that Harry didn't understand. He reckoned he could have reached out through the bond that connected them in the Mark and tried to understand that way, but he didn't want to. Perhaps Malfoy was deep in the throes of contemplation. Harry gritted his teeth, told himself that he should have known Malfoy would be like this no matter where they met, and tried to be still.

* * *

He was _touching _Harry again. Finally.

It was one thing to reach across the distance and touch him in his mind, or send the sensations of a hand caressing when Harry couldn't stop him and Draco didn't have to pay attention to his objections. But it was only a poor substitute for what he had right here, right now, warm flesh and quivering muscle shifting under his palm.

_Oh, Harry_.

He couldn't have stood up at the moment if he wanted to. The Muggles would have seen his erection, and that was not on. No one should see it, or touch it, again, but Harry. Draco didn't even want his own hand on it, at least not if he could persuade Harry to lay his there instead.

Draco licked his lips and forced himself to cast the spell that would reveal the points of light in the physical Mark that corresponded to the ones in the image he'd made. In deference to Harry's Muggle sensibilities, he kept his wand beneath the table and murmured the spell by barely moving his lips.

The Mark under his hand grew so warm that Draco wondered if he was burning Harry, but a swift glance showed that Harry was just sitting there, his teeth grinding as if he couldn't wait for this to be over with. Draco smiled and studied the image that had appeared on Harry's shoulder next to the real Mark, one only he could see. He moved his hand, but reluctantly, to compare them, and kept his fingertips lingering on Harry's arm. Harry shivered once, a sharp motion of disgust, but didn't try to throw him off.

"That's it," Draco murmured, hardly aware of what he was saying, drunk and dizzy on the closeness of the only man he desired, the only man he ever _would _desire again, the only wizard, the only person. "I can see the similarities now. Yes, the image I formed of the Mark matches the one on your shoulder. I can break the bond, and then I can cast another spell that will remove the physical scar."

"When?" Harry surged towards him, eyes so wide that Draco wanted to make a joke about them falling out of his head.

More than that, though, he wanted to take Harry's chin in one hand and plunge his tongue down that hot throat.

"Not here," Draco said. "It's not the kind of thing that can be done in public." He hesitated for a moment, and then moved ahead, because the hesitation was foolish. When had he ever paused before suggesting a desire of his? What he wanted, he took.

_Not with Harry._

"And it's not fast," he warned. "If you want me to do it in the way I described, then you'll need to spend at least a day with me. Can you do that without your precious friends getting upset?"

"I'll have to see." Harry's brows drew down. "There's something else, Malfoy. Something you're not telling me. Did you think that I haven't learned to read you by now?'

Ecstasy twisted around Draco like the lash of a whip, mingled with the hatred and contempt coming from Harry, fiery emotions that slashed down his stomach and chest and made him reply before he thought. "If you have cared enough to learn to read me, then I would want to know it."

Harry gave that sharp shiver again, but Draco thought—hoped—prayed—it was less a shiver of disgust this time and more the wondering motion of a wild animal who finds itself in a trap without knowing how it got there. "What aren't you telling me?"

"There's a faster method to remove the Mark," Draco admitted. "But it could only work if you trusted me. And I know that you don't, and nothing could make you do so." The way he saw it, there was nothing to be lost from admitting that. Harry would see that Draco was respecting his sacred rules of honesty, and Draco would get to spend more time with Harry's flesh beneath his fingers and have more hours to seduce him.

"I could try to trust," Harry said, "to have this Mark off my shoulder."

"You hate it that much," Draco said, while his heart thundered and leaped and he felt as if he were falling off a cliff, growing wings as he fell.

Harry's gaze seared him and made the ecstasy foam back to the surface for him. "Yes," he said hoarsely. "I hate it more than you know, more than you can understand."

Draco lost his breath altogether at the sight of the wild spirit flaring in those eyes. _God, so beautiful. So bright._

To hold Harry like this would be like holding a star in his hand.

And that made him lean closer, lower his voice so that Harry had to lean closer, too, and say, "Very well. If you think you can trust, we can try the faster method. But I'll warn you. It'll involve uncomfortable emotions."

"For the both of us?" Harry sat with his head held as if he was facing into a storm. _He would, too,_ Draco thought, breathless with excitement, hard but with a sweet lash of poison in his veins. _He would stare at his death and fight it if he had to. He won't want me to shelter him, when he finally comes to appreciation of me. He won't need me to protect him from decisions and constantly reassure him that he can make them, the way that Lisa does. What we could have is a partnership. _

Such a thing had never sounded appealing to Draco before. Right now, the very word was enough to make him clench the muscles in his legs under the table, less than a minute away from orgasm.

"No," Draco said. He had to clear his throat to say it, and Harry shifted warily, eyes locked on his face. Draco could almost forbear to care about the wariness because of the looking. "For you, primarily. I've already accepted the emotions that this interaction with you could cause me to feel, and I can confront them. But you?" He tilted his head to the side and let a small smile play on his lips, the merest shadow of the kiss that he wanted to show Harry. "I don't think that you've accepted it even now."

"The necessity of it, I have," Harry said flatly. "I want to try it the quicker way. Will we need privacy for that, too?"

"Oh, yes," Draco said, and he couldn't prevent the way his voice deepened or his hips surged forwards. Harry stared at him suspiciously, and Draco kept himself from rocking in the chair with an enormous effort. "You wouldn't want it to take place in the sight of Muggles, anyway. Tell me a place we can use."

"I don't _know_," Harry snapped. "Ron and Hermione won't let us use their house, for certain." He paused, then added, "Is what we have to do Dark?"

"Not in intent," Draco said. "But it could be seen that way, the same way that the Mark could be."

Harry gave him a very flat glance, as if to say that that was how he would always view the Mark, and then said, "The hollow where we—spoke last time. I noticed it had some resonances with Dark magic. Will that work?"

"It will," Draco said. He cast a quick charm that forced down his erection—it was painful, but necessary—and then stood, holding out his hand to Harry. Harry stared at him defiantly while rising to his feet on his own.

_Oh, God, in minutes I'll feel him under me…_

Draco turned away with a shake of his head and led the way out. He couldn't have spoken at the moment for anything; desire had its teeth in his throat.


	9. Under My Hands

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—Under My Hands_

"This is the place."

Harry had made sure that he'd Apparated ahead of Malfoy, so that he could speak the words and move towards the hollow ahead of him, too. His skin was prickling with tension, his teeth gritted to try and avoid betraying it. He was already wondering if he'd made a mistake in agreeing to the quick method.

But he could feel, more powerfully than his timidity, the burn of Malfoy's palm on the Mark. He needed the one gone as quickly as possible, so that he would never have to experience the other again.

"I know. I was here once before, you know, Harry."

Malfoy's voice was soft and drawling and pressed against his ears in exactly the _wrong_ fashion. Harry whipped around, teeth bared, throat so thick with words that he didn't know which ones were going to burst out before he said them. "Shut up! Shut the fuck up! You don't know what you're talking about, you barely know that this will work, I have to trust you, and everything you say is only making me hate you more!"

Malfoy pulled to a stop, staring at him. His brows had drawn down in a sharp frown, and he considered Harry as though he was thinking of pulling back and forgetting the whole thing. Harry stood there, panting, his body wracked with shudders as if he were a faultline subject to earthquakes, and hoped he would.

_Except that we can't, because there are those bloody oaths to consider._

For a moment, Harry felt something close to despair. He shut his eyes so that Malfoy couldn't see the emotion in them and take advantage of it, and stared into the distance without staring, feeling nothing at the moment but the heat of the sun on his face.

"Lead on, Harry," Malfoy said at last. "I won't say anything else until we arrive there, you can be sure of that."

They _were _there, on the edge of the hollow that Harry had covered with net spells before, but he couldn't bring himself to say that and acknowledge the gently, obtrusively calm and rational tone Malfoy was taking with him. Harry turned and walked into the hollow, on the verge of throwing up, his hand hovering above his wand. If Malfoy tried anything, Harry was sure that he could have it out and casting faster than Malfoy could. This wasn't Fox Valley, where Malfoy had lenses to drain magic set up everywhere and five Marked ones of various strengths at his back and call.

That should have made him feel confident, Harry thought as his feet crunched on the dry dust that covered the floor of the hollow. Not afraid, and not lonely, as though wishing for the company of one of those Marked ones.

He turned around to face Malfoy, fists held tight at his sides. Malfoy watched him in silence, arms folded as though he was reconsidering, in turn.

"Do what you have to do," Harry said. He had to moisten his lips and swallow saliva twice before he could make himself speak the words.

* * *

Draco had been waiting for this moment, and not even Harry's unexpected nervousness outside the hollow had deterred him. It had told him that he would have to move with more care, but that was all, and he had, essentially, prepared for that already when he thought of using the quick method with Harry.

He took his wand out of his pocket and held it up. Harry tensed, and didn't relax much when Draco laid the wand behind him near the side of the hollow that Harry had covered with trap spells the last time they were here, carefully out of the way.

_What are you doing? _Harry's voice sounded through the bond between them, up and down the scale, all the harmonics of caution.

_Getting something out of the way that might interfere with what I need to do, _Draco answered. _The Mark is rooted in my soul. It'll take an effort of my soul—and my body, since that is what my soul acts through—to remove it. _He spread his hands and flexed his fingers, fixing his attention on them and not on Harry for a moment. _The magical signature of the wand could resonate with what I'm doing and distract me. _He glanced sideways at Harry. _It would be for the best if you got rid of yours as well. _

Harry's mouth opened in a silent snarl of rejection. _It would, would it? Well, too bad. That's not going to work._

Draco spread one hand out, fingers curving up slightly. Let Harry get a good look at them. They would be the prime instruments Draco was using, and Harry had to accept them or it wasn't going to work. _Fine, then. It'll be the longer method, and that means that we have to spend most of the day here. I hope you brought something to eat._

Harry stood staring up at the side of the hollow as if he expected his moralistic little friends to appear there. Draco waited, his fingers flexing silently open and shut. His hands were steady, he noted, a bit dry, but comfortable to work with. Good. He didn't want his own nerves licking the palms with cold sweat or something like that when he was trying to do such delicate work.

"Fine," Harry said abruptly, and cast his wand from him in a high, slicing arc that Draco winced at instinctively, although it only clattered on the small stones behind him and didn't snap. "But the moment you try doing something I don't like, then I'm going to summon it back, and I think you know enough about my wandless magic to know what will happen then."

"I'm going to be doing lots of things you don't like," Draco said evenly, respecting Harry's need to retreat from the dangerous privacy of their bond and speak aloud. "Will you try to hurt me the moment I hurt you? Then neither method will work, the quick _or _the slow."

Harry quivered for a moment, and then clenched his fists hard enough that Draco saw a few small drops of blood land on the sand. He was angry at himself, Draco thought, for showing fear, for feeling fear, for paying more attention to the fear than the possibility of his precious freedom that he wanted so much. He took a few steps nearer and knelt down, staring at Draco so fiercely that no one could have mistaken it for a gesture of submission.

"Is this better?" he asked through gritted teeth.

"Closer to what I need," Draco said softly, and knelt down beside him. Harry blinked and looked as if he would shift away. Draco reached out and grasped his shoulders, pulling him nearer, then began to undo his shirt.

Harry stared at him, then up at the sky. His breathing had increased in rapidity, but he didn't sound as if he were about to hyperventilate and die, which Draco thought was a good thing. He shut his eyes a second later, in what looked like resignation.

Draco knew that would change as the touching continued.

But he had no particular need to prove that his contentions were right to Harry at the moment. So he continued to pull and unbutton, his mouth thick with saliva, his eyes heavy with dreams fulfilled. When he saw Harry's bare skin emerging, he bowed his head and breathed, gently, on it, and watched gooseflesh spring up in response.

Still Harry said nothing, and lay there with his eyes shut.

Draco murmured words he couldn't hear, and pushed Harry's shirt off him so that he could see the Mark.

* * *

_This is a stupid idea._

Harry's mind had said that to him so many times since they left the Muggle restaurant that Harry was getting tired of hearing it. He wished he had something to bite; then his back teeth wouldn't be constantly clenched together with nothing but air between them. He lay still and felt the sun on his face whenever he tilted it.

_This is a stupid idea._

_ Yes, I know, _Harry finally answered himself. _ But I have to be free of Malfoy, and do you have a better idea?_

_ Talking to yourself is even more stupid._

Harry grimaced and waited. Malfoy should be starting the magic soon, he thought. The Mark was bare, and Malfoy had his hands hovering near it, his fingertips brushing a line of dry heat down Harry's skin here and there in what Harry could only assume were deliberate touches, though they felt accidental.

Malfoy murmured something Harry couldn't make out, but which sounded like it was meant to be soothing. It wasn't. Harry bit his lip against the impulse to snap at Malfoy and began counting backwards from one hundred in his head.

Then Malfoy laid his right palm flat over the Mark and his left on the bare skin of Harry's chest, over his heart, and he lost the count.

_Fuck you, _he thought at Malfoy, though he didn't send it along the bond that connected them. _Do you have to keep touching me, or can you get on with it?_

Malfoy didn't respond. Instead, he closed his eyes and seemed to fall into the center of himself. His breathing slowed to the point that Harry would have said he was asleep if he didn't know better. Harry scooped up handfuls of sand and held them like that, ready to throw them in Malfoy's eyes as improvised weapons if he had to.

Malfoy's fingers tightened in response, and Harry had the crazy idea, for a moment, that Malfoy would use his _skin _against him in return, scooping up handfuls of it like the sand. But then his fingers smoothed out again and he opened his mouth.

Harry felt rather than heard the note he voiced; it trembled in the air around him, and the earth. His heart jumped in response to it, and then began to race. Malfoy's fingers steamed. Harry stared at them and wondered if they would sink into his chest.

They didn't. He felt a violent tug racing down into the center of his body instead, aiming for the Mark on his shoulder at first and then traveling beyond it. Harry twisted like a fish on a line, upset and terrified. Malfoy hadn't told him—

Then he remembered. After Malfoy had moved the Mark, the only connection it had was to Harry's soul. It made sense that it would pull at Harry's soul now, when Malfoy was seeking to remove it. Harry laid his head back and remembered what Malfoy had said, that Harry would have to trust him if the fast way was to work.

_Trust him not to damage my soul._

Harry swallowed a burst of laughter, the kind that would probably disturb Malfoy, and did his best to calm his panicked breathing. He could feel a further, shimmering tug, like someone feeling their way along the rope he was caught on, and decided that Malfoy had probably gone into his soul, or his mind, or the strange half-world that composed both when they talked along the Mark. He closed his eyes more tightly, and tried not to think.

* * *

The pattern of red lights in front of him was the same as the one that Draco had conjured with the image. He had studied them until he memorized them, and he knew they wouldn't suddenly change on him, melt or flash or flinch. That meant all he had to do was reach out and smother them with a palm.

In theory.

In practice, he couldn't touch the lights. Draco kept reaching out, getting his hand—or the analogue of his hand, the magical power that, in this time and place, his brain pictured as a hand—near them, and then being rebuffed. A magical barrier seemed to protect them, sheltering them under glass.

That Draco knew the magical barrier to be of his own creation did nothing for his temper.

He tried to approach each one in multiple ways before he decided that it wouldn't work. He had known it wouldn't from the first failure, truly, but he had thought he had to try, because Harry would be so unhappy about the other option.

He turned and flung his voice in the direction of Harry's mind. _Harry! I need you to let me take control of your magic._

The refusal that came didn't have words. It was simple, flat, blank, drowning. Draco kept his balance under it with difficulty. He knew it could have swept him out of Harry's soul, and Harry probably would have preferred it that way.

But this was the quicker method, the one Harry had implied he wanted because God forbid that he have Draco's Mark on his body for an instant longer than necessary. Draco sent that to him, a reminder, and then added, _If you want me to do something else, then you'll need to pause and let me get out of your soul._

Silence, but Draco wasn't so stupid as to think Harry hadn't heard him. This was churning silence, the kind that a whirlpool in deep water made. A snarl echoed in Draco's ears finally, and he felt magic flowing towards him.

He reached into it, and took control of it, and was a god.

The force that was him reached into dim and distant cracks and corners that he knew were the cracks and corners of Harry's being. Draco could feel himself lifting emotions, reading thoughts, touching memories. He could have done anything in that moment, anything that concerned Harry's soul, and as far as he knew or cared to know, Harry's soul was the world. He could have ripped his body apart, commanded Harry to fuck himself on Draco's fingers, anything. He breathed and he stormed and he flooded _strength._

Because he could do anything, he chose to do what was most tender and unexpected. He reached down and groped about a bit until he found the Mark. Then he hit the red lights that marked the bonds and protective spells with all the force of his grip at once, crushing them like the scurrying bodies of ladybugs. He felt a few minute flickers of pain as they faded, as one of his connections to Harry was ended.

But given how much power he still had, he couldn't mourn them, or the destruction of his perfectly-made Mark, as he had assumed he would when he was standing in Thylacine's Lair.

He could feel Harry's mind circling him uneasily as he finished, and he reached out and touched it, melded his thoughts with Harry's. They no longer had the mental bond they had used to speak to each other, but that didn't matter, not when he was _here _and knew Harry's impulses and ideas better than he knew them himself.

_You won't give it back, _Harry thought. _You only agreed to destroy the Mark because you knew that you could make me more of a slave than ever to you. I see it all now._

He did think he saw it all then, and his cry was a flood of bitterness that Draco refused to swallow. He shook his head. _I gave it back once, when you poured your core into me, and I'm going to give it back again, _he assured Harry.

Harry's lack of conviction was another blank wave slapping him, a streak of uncertainty and depth in all that living ocean. _How can I be sure?_

_Because of this, _Draco said, and although it was the hardest thing he had ever done, he surrendered.

He bowed down; he opened the hands that clutched Harry's power close to himself, the knowledge and the memories and the thoughts that were part of him, or had come to feel as though they were part of him in that short time, and he let them go. They flowed and crashed back into the ocean of Harry's being, and they ran away to become indistinguishable from the rest of him again.

Draco could hear Harry gaping, gasping. He didn't know how he was hearing that, but the sound made him hard anyway. He could feel his body settling around him again, like a shell. He shuddered and opened his eyes, trying not to mourn the sense of lost connection. He knew in a few moments that he wouldn't remember the greatness of the composite being he had been, and that would dull the sadness he did experience.

He found himself looking at Harry as he lay there with his shirt off, his chest shining. The Mark was gone from his shoulder, although there was a dent in the skin there, slightly red, as though he'd been sunburned. Draco reached out to touch it.

Harry caught his wrist, hard, in a grip that felt like an iron pincer. Draco looked at him with calm, alien eyes. Harry shuddered and twisted away from him, digging one elbow into the sand as he sat up.

"That was…" he whispered.

"Fucking strange?" Draco asked with a faint smile as he leaned back.

"I don't know what the hell you did, Malfoy." Harry turned around to stare at him, and his voice was a sharp bark. "But I _know _that you did it because you wanted me to trust you, and for _no other reason._"

"Your Mark is gone," Draco said, working to hold back his anger. Yes, perhaps Harry thought he had reasons to feel this way, but he _knew _what Draco had given up, and he had to have felt Draco's reluctance to do so. Hell, he would know that Draco was reluctant even if he hadn't felt his emotions just then, because of the way that Draco had talked about power in the past. "What good would getting you to trust me permanently have done? I can't make that happen. And you've sworn the oath, so I know that you're going to stay with me, around me, no matter what."

Harry scuttled backwards like a crab. His eyes never moved. His sides heaved and shook with distrust. Draco thought of asking him if it hurt to be such a pinhead, but refrained.

"You can't," Harry whispered, and nothing else.

"Can't what?" Draco rose to his feet and backed towards the part of the pit where his wand lay, but Harry was closer to the holly one. "Enlighten me."

"You can't—do this," Harry said, and his fingers were digging into his palms and his eyes were so wide with distress that Draco wanted to touch and soothe him. But when he eased a foot closer to Harry, Harry bolted even further away. His fingers were only a few inches from his wand now. "You can't do what you just did to me."

A slow excitement began to tighten the muscles in Draco's legs and groin, but of course there was no saying that Harry had felt the _same _sort of impulses and longings that he had. He kept his voice calm, relaxed, bored, his hands draped at his sides. "What? Take control of your magic? I did it and then I left your mind. I promise, I haven't left some little part of me in your mind to control you. You would have known if I did, and it would have been contrary to the spirit of the oath."

* * *

_The spirit, but not the letter, _Harry thought. He felt the same way he imagined someone without the ability to speak Parseltongue would when confronting a snake: horrified, upset, flinching in instinctive terror.

Harry had known how it would be when Malfoy went into his head. He had known that Malfoy would make some demand that Harry was unwilling to meet, assert his "dominance," because that was what he did. He had handed over control of his magic only because he was relatively sure that he could get it back in a pitched battle.

Malfoy had yielded without much pressure, the way he had poured the magic back into Harry's core a few days ago under no pressure that Harry could have brought to bear.

It hurt Harry. It upset him. It made his skin prickle and sting and his fingers hurt with their grip on each other.

Malfoy _wasn't supposed to do that. _

He was the Dark Lord Harry had been fighting for months. He was the owner of Fox Valley, the man who had enslaved God knew how many Marked ones; Harry knew that at least one had died in the past, and there were probably others he'd never met. He was the one who had given Harry the Mark against his will and said that he would rather Harry die than remove it.

He was obsessed with power. It didn't matter what sort of gabble and burble Malfoy might spout about being attracted to him; Harry knew the _real _source of his fascination. If Harry had suddenly become a Squib, then Malfoy's attraction to him would have died as fast as it had arisen in the first place.

That meant Malfoy should have fought to keep the magic. He shouldn't have handed it back, as though it were a gift.

As though…

As though he was capable of learning better. As though he was capable of _changing._

And Harry knew that couldn't be so, because he knew that Malfoy was a machine, an obsessed madman, a Dark Lord. As insane as Voldemort, and that meant that anything Harry did against him was all right.

If Malfoy could change, that meant Harry had to question everything he had thought was true about Malfoy. It meant that he might have to feel guilty about torturing Malfoy when he had almost managed to put that behind him. It meant that he might have to consider Malfoy's requests to meet and work on their shared magic, their _creation _of magic, seriously, rather than assuming it was all a trap and a trick.

_He could still be tricking you, _whispered the cautious voice that Harry had carried in the back of his head for years, and that had saved his life more than once when the choice had been resisting or trusting a Dark wizard. _He could have decided that he'd rather give up a small amount of power now to gain a larger one later._

But that still meant his mind slammed against the cage bars it had built for itself, because the way Harry understood Malfoy, he shouldn't have been capable of such a plan—not because he was unsubtle, but because it was simply too opposite the way his mind worked. He should have been _unable _to let the power go. He would cling to it because he had to, because he was irrational when it came to the use and retention of magic.

If Malfoy could change…

It meant that Harry would have to change.

He seized his wand and cast a curse at Malfoy, barely thinking about which one he picked, only knowing that it was something that would hurt. Malfoy lifted his hands and parted them, and a crackling white ball of energy, shining like ripples of light on water, opened between his palms, swallowing the curse harmlessly.

For a moment, there was nothing in the pit but their breathing and the stare that filled the world between them with crackling intensity.

"The Cruciatus Curse, Harry?" Malfoy's voice was low, and if there was any emotion in it besides disappointment, Harry couldn't read it. "I—thought you would choose something different if you cared to choose something that would hurt me. But it seems that you return to your old tricks like a dog to vomit."

The Cruciatus.

He'd cast it _again._

Harry turned, his breath coming short, and bolted for the side of the pit, scrambling up it with his elbows and his fingers. Halfway through the climb, he remembered that he was a wizard and Apparated back to the rock garden outside Ron and Hermione's house.

All the while, the skin where his Mark had been stung and hissed with guilt.


	10. The Spirit and the Letter

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—The Spirit and the Letter_

"Are you all right, mate?"

Harry grunted and took another mouthful of the pasta that Hermione had made. He hadn't cooked once since he'd got here, he thought in some distraction. He ought to do something about that. Back at the Dursleys', he would have cooked every meal and cleaned up afterwards.

He froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. _That_ was an odd thing to think. What was wrong with him, comparing his best friends, no matter how uncomfortable they made him, to the Dursleys? He put down the fork with a hand that shook and stretched it out so that he could watch the tremors.

"Harry?" Hermione this time, rising from her seat and leaning forwards as though she thought he was going to have a heart attack at the table. "_Are _you all right? You have an expression on your face that says you aren't."

Harry clamped his teeth down on the speech he wanted to make about how it took his expression to tell her that, when she knew all the other things that were going wrong in his life because of Malfoy and the Mark and their bloody refusal to accept that he was a Dark wizard. He hadn't given them much chance to accept it, he reminded himself again. He'd dropped suddenly into their lives after almost two years of no contact and expected them to catch up in a hurry with events he was still struggling to understand and react to himself.

Instead, he shook his head and said, "Something happened today that I'll need to think about. That's all. But the food is good," he added, and made himself go back to eating dinner like a normal human being.

Ron and Hermione exchanged significant glances. Harry ground his teeth again, and then stopped as it really started to hurt. He applied himself grimly to the meal. He didn't know what they were thinking about him, he reminded himself, and it wouldn't have mattered even if he did. The _important _part, the part that his mind was still spinning around, was what had happened between him and Malfoy today.

That was the part he didn't know how to react to. That was the part that had scared him so badly that he'd spent hours pacing the garden outside before he could force himself to come in for an evening of ordinary food and talk with his best friends.

But no matter how he thought about it, it was like trying to chew rocks. They didn't change, and they only broke his teeth.

"Harry, I found something I think might help you."

Harry returned to the world with a bump and looked up, only then remembering that he'd told Hermione to do some research on various ways of removing the Mark from his shoulder. Research that he didn't need now, he thought, because Malfoy really had kept his word and taken the Mark away. But he couldn't tell that to Hermione yet, so he would have to come up with some plausible story for her.

"Oh." He fetched up a smile from some deep well of his imagination and presented it. From the look on her face, Hermione wasn't impressed. Harry coughed and managed to grope up a few more words. "Thanks! Did a book arrive from Britain, or is it something from a book that you had here?"

"From a book here." Hermione reached down and picked up the thick tome that was lying next to her chair, pulling out a fringed silk bookmark from an inside page and turning to the actual page immediately, before she could lose her place. Harry wanted to shake his head in admiration, but he was aware of Ron's eyes on him, and he was afraid of how he might interpret the gesture, so he kept his head still and his face bland. "Look, it looks as though some Dark Lord in the past had the same idea."

Harry leaned over to see the picture on the page. It showed a grandly dressed wizard in the center, sketched so realistically that Harry wouldn't have been surprised to see him turn around and fire a cool glance at his audience. By contrast, the figures that surrounded him were nearly cartoonish, joined to the wizard with glowing red lines.

"Dark Lords have always distrusted their followers more than any enemy they were fighting," Hermione said. "It seems they've always invented traps to take them and wards to watch them, even when they _told _them that watching wasn't in the plans."

"What can you expect?" Ron finished his meal and leaned over to join them. "The people who follow Dark Lords are Dark wizards, and since when is one of _those _bastards trustworthy?"

Harry tensed in spite of himself. Ron glanced at him a moment later, studied him, and then said, "Sorry, mate," in the same tone he'd used to speak of the Dark wizards. Harry nodded, feeling like a puppet, and made an encouraging gesture at Hermione, who was looking between them unhappily.

"Most people do it with specialized wards at a distance, or on objects that they carry," Hermione said. She made a face. "Voldemort's a bit stupid, really, and so is Malfoy, to give his followers a visible Mark. If one of them's taken alive, they'd have to answer some hard questions about it."

"Depending on the follower, they might be willing enough to do that," Harry said. "Not everyone is there by choice. Remember Snape."

"He went willingly at first," Ron said. "Wasn't that what you told us, when you told us about his memories of your Mum?"

"At first," Harry said. "And he told Voldemort about the prophecy willingly, too, as long as he promised not to kill my mum. Too bad _that _didn't work out." He tried to lose himself in that old pain for a moment, the idea that he might have had at least one parent to take care of him, rather than thinking about the thing with Malfoy.

It didn't work. His wound at the loss of his mum and dad was so scabbed over that it took picking—in the form of a direct insult, usually, which almost no one in Britain had offered him in two years—to make it bleed. The wound with Malfoy was fresh and bloody, and there was a large share of salt around to rub in it.

"It's all right, Harry," Hermione said softly, apparently under the impression that he _was _still hurting from that old wound. "Snape did what he could to make up for that." She patted his arm and gestured again at the picture. "What we have to do is break the bonds. The Mark itself is annoying, yes, but it's the less important part."

Harry blinked. "You mean removing the physical Mark might not be possible?"

"Possible or impossible, it's not what's _important_," Hermione said. "The connections the Mark has embedded in it—or, sometimes, represents—are what actually bind you, or anyone else, to a Dark Lord. You could remove the Mark without removing those connections. That would leave you free of the suspicion that other people direct towards you—"

_Although not the suspicion in your eyes, _Harry wanted to say, and then bit his tongue violently. He probably deserved that suspicion, given what he'd done to Malfoy today.

"But still enslaved." Hermione shut the book with a snap and produced a parchment covered with notes from the inside of her sleeve. "Another book I read suggested ways to break the connections. They all depend on the assertion of free will. It's very much harder for someone who got enslaved willingly to struggle free."

"No problem there," Harry said, a sluggish stirring of hope inside him. What if Malfoy had removed the Mark but hadn't broken the connection? That meant that he was what Harry had always thought him, still a monster, who would consider going back on the oaths they'd sworn and have a way to keep Harry bound while assuring him he was free. That way, he could still have access to Harry's power, too.

"I know there isn't." Hermione's eyes were soft now. "No matter what you've done, Harry, I know that you wouldn't agree to follow him and just let him _have _you."

_And that's what I have to keep in mind, _Harry told himself fiercely. _I'm someone who can't yield, because that would validate everything Malfoy told me. I can't give in to him, no matter what he does for me._

"How can I break the connections?" he asked.

Hermione began to explain, and although she used theoretical magical terms that Harry didn't understand, she also used words that made sense, calm and commonplace words that relaxed him and gave him something new to think about. It would be relatively easy to perform the experiment. That way, he could get rid of any traps that Malfoy had left buried beneath his flesh and soul.

_Any? You know bloody well that he must have left _some, _Harry. It would be unrealistic of him not to try it, at least._

Yes, that was true. Harry had spent too much time already drowning in guilt for stupid things. Feeling guilty for resisting Malfoy, for protecting his life and freedom, was another of them. He turned his mind firmly away and listened to Hermione.

_Things can change back to the way that they're supposed to be. I can be friends with my friends again, and I can have the magic and the life that I want. Malfoy might not even contact me again. Why would he want someone who lashed out at him with Dark magic?_

But that was another part of the things that Harry had decided not to think about, so he whipped the doubts into submission and continued soaking up the Light magic, the right magic, the good magic, that Hermione was teaching him about.

* * *

Draco hissed as he eased himself out of the shower and into a padded chair of the kind that were common in Thylacine's Lair. At the moment, he was glad they were common. He wasn't sure that he could have walked fast or far.

The Cruciatus Curse had assaulted him unexpectedly, with no chance for him to brace for it, and it had gone deeper and hurt more because of his shock. He had never believed that Harry would use it against him.

Draco extended a hand in front of him and watched it shake with clinical detachment. He was thinking.

Harry's resistance was in part an instinctive thing, he decided, probably born of the long years when he had been Dumbledore's pawn and used in the war against the Dark Lord. He would hate anyone who had tried to control him even when they relaxed that control and proved they wanted an equal relationship with him. He would lash out, and Draco could see now why he felt such guilt over an accident like the one that had caught two people in a fire while Harry managed to Apparate out. He probably equated it to the times, like now, when he _was _at fault for using a spell deliberately. He would be left with the same trapped, hopeless feelings in both cases.

But that didn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered even if one curse was enough to make Draco want to pack up and leave Harry behind. They had their oaths connecting them, and they would both lose their magic and their lives if they didn't fulfill those oaths.

Draco had done as much as his oath asked him to do. The Mark was gone, Harry was free except for his sworn word, and Draco was only awaiting payment.

He considered, mind blown clear with his new understanding, whether he should wait longer. Perhaps giving Harry time to recover and let his guilt grow would soften his resistance.

But Draco didn't think so. For one thing, that guilt would only give them another problem to deal with later, and for a second, Harry was good at putting aside and ducking and denying those things he _really _didn't want to face, unlike the mistakes that would put him in the light of a martyr. He had probably already decided that this was Draco's fault, in some obscure way, or that Draco hadn't kept his word.

Draco smiled and reached for parchment. He did have to wait a short time before his hand stopped shaking, but not long.

* * *

Harry laid the wand against his shoulder, where the Mark had been, and then traced a straight line down to the place on his left forearm where the fox had originally rested. He hissed between his teeth, a long build-up to the incantation that Hermione had taught him, a meaningless sound that gave him time to consider his goal and gather his will.

Then he burst out into flight with the words that had been building behind his teeth.

"_Volo! Voluntas! Volo liberatem!_"

The skin on his shoulder and arm where the wand had passed shuddered and jerked, and Harry felt magic pour through him, become a waterfall through him, spark and leap and _sing_. He could hear the shudders in his bones resolving themselves into a definite pattern, and he was afire with that ecstasy, with the trembling in his legs, with the way his head spun as he sank into a kneeling position on the carpet. Oh, God, it felt so _good_. He knew the magic was working because, Hermione had told him, it would be painful if he didn't truly want to be free.

He did want to. He wanted it more than anything, more than the guilt he had been scored with, more than the ability to stop being a Dark wizard, more than the pleasure and power Malfoy had tried to tempt him with.

Abruptly, the magic ceased. Harry blinked and leaned back on his heels, his wand clutched in a trembling hand. He pulled back his sleeve, although he already knew the Mark was gone and wasn't sure what he expected to see.

Nothing, in fact. The skin was simply blank. Almost accusingly so, Harry thought, and then shook the strange thought away. He _was _trying to keep guilt from having as much of a place in his life as it had had so far.

He turned around, and found the owl sitting on the edge of his bed, preening its feathers with small clips of its beak. It snapped to attention when it saw him and hopped closer, hooting softly.

Harry knew who it would be from. But he was free now. He was strong now. He was sure the spell had destroyed any markers Malfoy had left on him, which meant that he was free to laugh at the bastard.

He opened the letter almost eagerly, expecting a long missive that would justify its existence, only to find a few simple lines scribbled on the parchment.

_Harry,_

_ I would remind you that I swore an oath to free you, and kept my word. I would remind you that you also swore an oath, and you risk the loss of both magic and life if you don't keep it. Come join with me to create our magic._

_ Draco._

Harry crumpled the parchment up into a ball. That was ridiculous. He didn't have to keep his oath because Malfoy hadn't kept his. He had removed the physical Mark, but left those connections and bonds buried in his flesh, as Hermione had said Dark Lords could do. And now he thought to trick Harry into surrendering by invoking an oath that Harry had made _only_ on the condition that Malfoy keep his?

Then something occurred to Harry. How could he have written a letter like this if he was really dying, if he hadn't kept his promise?

And then there was a soft, slicking pain along the side of his left arm, and he turned his head to find that a bloody wound had opened there, of its own accord, dripping onto the carpet as he stared at it.

That meant…

It meant that the oath was coming home to him. That he had to keep his promise. That Malfoy had kept his.

Which meant there was no Mark left, and no connections and bonds that could tie him to Malfoy, except the word he had given while never thinking that he would need to keep it. How could you swear a solemn, serious oath to someone who you knew would find a loophole to wriggle through?

Except now…

There wasn't.

Which meant all Harry's fears about Malfoy, that he could actually have changed his mind and be a different man than the one Harry had thought of, were true. And he had to keep his promise. And work with him.

And not be free.

Harry stood up and walked towards the parchment that he kept in a drawer, glad that the owl was staying and he wouldn't have to think about another means to get a reply back to Malfoy. Along the way, he felt his wound close, and when he looked down, he realized that there was no sign it had been there, except for a few droplets of blood still shimmering on his skin.

It had done that because he intended to keep his promise. To feel guilty for the monster who wasn't a monster and serve the man who had wanted his service and nearly killed him to have it.

Not for the first time in the past month, Harry wished that Malfoy had killed him in his initial flight from Fox Valley. It would have been easier to face that than—than _this, _whatever it was.

* * *

_Malfoy, fine. Tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it._

That was all. Draco sighed and leaned back on his bed, shaking his head sorrowfully. The letter hung above him in one hand that no longer shook; a nap and a few potions had helped him recover wonderfully from the aftereffects of the Cruciatus Curse.

_It doesn't have to be this way, Harry, _he thought, wishing he could reach out and touch the object of his thoughts directly. But he'd given up that ability. _I want your surrender, but your unwilling submission doesn't have to be part of that, and shouldn't. Even when I wanted to conquer you without any other goal in mind, I never wanted you to be some meek idiot taking whatever his master handed out. I wanted you enjoying yourself._

Draco didn't think he could explain that, though. In the first place, Harry probably wouldn't believe him; in the second, he would only say that everything had changed now that the Mark had gone.

_That's the problem, really. He doesn't know how to react, and so he keeps lashing out._

Draco had a meal delivered to him while he thought, and ate his way slowly through the thick salad, covered with bits of egg and walnut, closing his eyes whenever a lettuce leaf crunched in his mouth. By the time he finished it, he knew what he wanted to write back.

_We have to make those decisions together, Harry. Come to the hollow where we've confronted each other twice now if you want to, tomorrow at noon. If you want to choose some other place, then please do so. I'm not picky about where we meet. I only know that I'd like to see you again._

Then it was dispatched, and Draco felt free to watch the owl flap away with the letter before his eyes fell shut and sleep consumed him.

* * *

_He leaves it all up to me. Or at least he pretends to. I'm sure this is all a ploy in the service of some goal that I can't see yet._

Harry prowled slowly back and forth in the middle of his room. It was incredibly hot, although he knew he could cast Cooling Charms, and at least some of the sweat pouring down his face didn't come from the heat. The wonderful pleasure from the spell that he'd used earlier had been replaced by intense prickling in his arm and shoulder.

He almost wished the Mark was there, because it would give him something to struggle against other than his own conscience.

_And that's the problem. I was running so long on the fear and excitement of challenging or escaping from an opponent, and now Malfoy isn't one._

Harry sat down heavily on his bed. He would have liked to be able to deny that, to believe in the existence of conspiracies or traps that Malfoy had set and which he didn't see yet. It _was _true that he thought he would be stupid to trust Malfoy's reassurance simply because Malfoy said he could.

But he had been the one who used the Cruciatus Curse, and Malfoy hadn't scolded him, the way he could have, playing on Harry's guilt. He sent letters, and letters that Harry could have refused or refused to respond to or set spells on his room to exclude. Harry didn't know from those letters what Malfoy was doing at the moment, but he doubted that it was plotting against him, plotting to reduce him to a slave.

Harry put his head in his hands. A frustrated noise broke from him.

He wished it was two years ago. He would have asked to come to Australia from Ron and Hermione. That was what had started his downfall, he believed now: being alone, with no one to tell him that borrowing spells from Dark wizards and beating up on himself morally and mentally for accidents was a bad idea. He would have done _fine _if he could have been with them all this time. Leaving himself alone was asking for trouble.

Well, trouble had found him. And Harry no longer believed that running from Malfoy was a permanent solution, not when he carried the oath in his body and blood.

He swallowed and sat up. Then he reached for the parchment to write his letter back, because there were some things that had to be done and faced up to, no matter how much he might hate it.

_The hollow will be fine. There's a resonance of our magic there now, and it's distant enough from Ron and Hermione's house. _

The letter was sent, and Harry made himself watch the owl fly away. Then he laid his hands out on his knees and took a few deep, calming breaths, holding in the impulse to fly apart at the seams he was feeling.

He was a Dark wizard.

He had used the Unforgivable Curses in circumstances where it would have been better not to.

He was bound to Malfoy via an oath that he didn't know he could fulfill.

He had lied to his best friends about, among other things, the disappearance of the Mark. He would have to hope that they wouldn't react too badly when they found out about that.

He was committed.

.


	11. Tense as a Wire

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eleven—Tense as a Wire_

"Where are you going, mate?"

Of course, the one time Ron decided to check on him and prevent him from leaving the house would be the most important time, Harry thought in resignation. He turned around and put his back to the door, trying to smile. Ron didn't look as though he was buying it, but at least he hadn't drawn his wand yet or called Hermione from the ground-floor library where she was researching.

"Out," Harry said. "I need—to get away from here for a while, I think. To walk and think about the Mark and what I'm going to do once it's gone."

Ron didn't smile and nod him on his way, although he still didn't call Hermione, either. He simply narrowed his eyes and shook his head. "I wish that I could believe you, mate," he whispered. "But I can't."

Harry frowned. "What do you mean?" He kept himself from bolting or lashing out by sheer force of will, the same kind he had used to keep himself still under Malfoy's hands when the bastard was removing his Mark.

"I mean that you haven't shown as much interest in the Mark during the last few days as you should have," Ron said. "I mean that you left before, and went to a Muggle city. That's the one of your trips out I know about, though I'm sure you've made others. One of my acquaintances keeps an eye on any new wizard in Australia, since so many of them run here thinking they can escape from the laws in their home countries. And he felt two magical signatures together, not one. You met with Malfoy."

In the silence, Harry made out his heart, beating so hard in his ears that the sound hurt.

"Mate," Ron whispered. "What the _fuck _are you doing?"

"You can tell Hermione that she can stop looking up books on the Mark, if you want to," Harry said. "It's gone."

Ron's eyes widened, and that was the one comical thing that had happened between them so far, the one thing Harry was glad he'd seen. "But Malfoy would never have agreed to take it off," he said. "I can believe you meeting with him for that, but if he couldn't help you—what did you do? Was it more Dark magic?" He sounded as if "Dark" was a thorny, prickly word that he couldn't hold in his mouth without damage to his tongue and cheeks.

"Always the suspicion," Harry said, but his light tone shook, and he cursed himself for speaking at all. His head rose, and he felt the energy that had first shown up several days ago, when he and Malfoy exchanged cores, stir in him. It was rising in a whirlwind, and if he wasn't careful, he would reach out and engulf Ron with it. He didn't want to do that. He had no _reason _to do that. He had to stand here and sound as calm and cool as possible and not attack his best friend for asking a question he had reason to be concerned about, if the Australian Ministry's rules were really that strict.

"The truth," Ron said. "The Mark was a piece of Dark magic. I don't think even Malfoy could have removed it just like that, given what you told us about him and it and how it was meant to last. Mate." He shifted a step closer, and Harry might have been comforted by the implication that Ron could still stand to be near him, if he didn't recognize the way his hand hovered above his wand. Ron wasn't an Auror anymore, but he had been trained as one. Harry could still defeat him, he was certain, but that he might _have _to was enough to make his head spin and his vision tighten. "What are you doing? Just tell me, and—and we can help. We can help you get away from it."

"Away from it," Harry said flatly. He no longer recognized his voice. He wondered if this was the way the creature who cursed Malfoy might have spoken. "What are you talking about, when you know the Mark has gone?"

"Away from the magic you're using." Ron's voice was very soft, his eyes shining with some emotion that Harry didn't instantly recognize but which he was fairly sure was pity. "We can help you, Harry. We know how addictive Dark magic can be, but it doesn't _need _to be that way. We can free you. Come on." He extended his hand, the way, Harry thought, that he would try to pull back someone who was dangling over an abyss. "All you have to say is that you want help and come with us."

Harry stared at him again. "Really," he said, his eyes flickering down to where Ron's fingertips now touched his wand.

Ron sighed. "Well, and surrender your wand. I'm sorry, but now I understand what we're dealing with. You're an addict. You don't take what addicts say seriously or let them have their wands when they're mentally ill."

"Ill," Harry said. "You keep changing your mind. I'm a monster. I'm a Dark wizard, and responsible for it. I'm an addict, and not responsible for it. You know, if you do take the last position, you'll have to surrender your moral indignation over what I've done."

Ron winced. "Yeah, I know," he said, not looking away. He inched another step closer. "I mean, using Dark magic in the first place, you could have helped, but not what you've done since then. And I know that your desperation was probably driven on by the fact that you wanted to find some way to get the bloody Mark off." He smiled at Harry. "We can understand. We've done dumb things in our lives, too. Remind me to tell you some time about what we tried to do to apply for Australian citizenship when we first got here. It's a laugh."

Harry stared at Ron's hand. He could accept it—

No, he couldn't, not with the oath biting into his throat like a piano wire.

And besides…he doubted that he would have taken Ron's hand even if he wasn't bound by the oath. He had recognized, yesterday, that he was a far more integrated being, far more in charge of his actions, than he had wanted to think about. The price of not being a slave was being a free moral agent.

Harry bowed his head and sighed. Ron came a step nearer, as if he assumed the sigh was permission of a sort, though Harry didn't know how he had mistaken it for anything other than what it was.

"Mate," he said eagerly. "You'll come back with us? You'll—"

"No," Harry said, looking up and blinking. "I've already chosen my course, and I've made promises that I can't turn back from. If I follow the road far enough, then I think I'll be at peace. Not _entirely,_" he added hastily, because Ron's face was darkening and Harry knew that he might think Harry was making fun of him. "But eventually I'll come to terms with what I've done. That's what I have to do, Ron, not hide from it and pretend that I can 'heal' somehow when I can't change the fact that I might need Dark spells someday."

"But you _don't,_" Ron said. "That's what we've been trying to tell you! If you stay here, away from Britain where the Death Eaters might hunt you down, who would ever come after you again?"

"Malfoy," Harry said. "The Mark's gone, but I made a promise that I would still—associate with him." He didn't feel up to telling Ron that he expected to be able to create magic with the bastard, not when Ron's face was already twisting in confusion and disgust. "I didn't particularly want to!" Harry added. "But that was his price for taking the Mark off, was that I make a promise like that."

"I don't even know what to say," Ron said. His extended hand clenched into a fist. "You're rejecting the chance to become—to become _better_, to get away from your illness, because of _him_?"

"Not just because of him," Harry said. "I mean, a lot of it's him, but." He rubbed the back of his head, and wished that he had had someone else to explain this aloud to before he tried with Ron. Then again, his audiences were fairly limited. Malfoy might have listened to it, but there was no way Harry would share it with him until he was forced to.

"I've realized that I've been lying to myself," Harry said. "Pretending I was a monster sometimes and couldn't change, and pretending that I felt this enormous guilt other times, when I knew perfectly well that I wasn't to blame. I've been lying. I'd like to try and stop. I'd like to find someone who can help me."

"You think Malfoy can." It wasn't a question. Ron had locked eyes with him and folded his arms back across his chest, which Harry thought ended the chance for him to reconcile with his friend. He licked his lips.

"Not so much in himself," Harry said. "But because he won't let me hide behind my lies, because he'll make fun of them, yeah."

Ron closed his eyes and bowed his head. His posture was so weary that Harry winced again, because he didn't like hurting his best friend like this.

_Since pleasing him is apparently impossible, though, I think I'm going to hurt him no matter what I do._

"I don't understand this," Ron said, and his voice snapped and snarled, then found something that it broke on. "How you can go to _him_ when he was the one who hurt you, and _we're _the ones who offered to help you."

"It's because of circumstances," Harry said. "Because he was the one who enslaved me, and the one who I had to make this promise to to get the Mark off."

"You could have waited for Hermione to find something in the books,' Ron breathed. He had taken a step closer again, but Harry doubted it was to extend the hand of friendship. "You _knew _she was looking. How desperate were you, that you couldn't wait a few days to give her a chance?"

Harry shook his head. He wanted to say something, but he knew that Ron wouldn't take it seriously no matter what he tried, and he knew that he didn't really _deserve _to be taken seriously.

"You made a devil's bargain with Malfoy," Ron said. "This time, you don't have the excuse of the Mark. He didn't make you do this. You only did it because you were impatient, and you didn't trust Hermione. You didn't trust Hermione," he repeated, as if that was a crime on a level with murder—or using Dark magic, Harry reckoned. "After all this time."

"Too much time," Harry snapped. He didn't want to be standing here and discussing this with Ron. He wanted to get to the bloody meeting with Malfoy and see how his ideas actually stood up in the fire the bastard would cover them with. "We've sort of stopped being friends, don't you think, Ron? We'd have to try hard to get back to where we were two years ago, and I don't know that I want to."

Ron flinched, his eyes widening. Harry stood there, stunned himself. He hadn't known he thought that.

_Well, if one lie and one wall is breaking down, then I reckon that it's only fitting that it should happen to others at the same time._

"You can't mean that," Ron said at last. "We're your friends. Not him. What can he offer you that we can't?"

Harry shook his head. "It's not about that," he said. "It's about what I have to do and the fact that he understands the reasons I used Dark magic. He might not agree with all of them, but he understands. You tell me that I just shouldn't use it, I'm an addict, I'm ill, and don't offer me any answers."

"Because you want the answers that mean we agree!" Ron yelled, his face flushing. "We can't do that, not when it's evil—"

"I'm not going to speak to you about this anymore," Harry said, lowering his voice so that something worse wouldn't happen. "I have to go." He turned and pushed the front door open, stepping into the air. Usually he thought it was too dry and stale, but right now, he gulped it down and felt his lungs expanding with a gratitude that he could barely express.

"Harry!"

Harry spun around. Ron was running after him, and his wand was in his hand, and his eyes were narrow. Harry didn't wait to find out if Ron would try to curse him, or if he only wanted to apologize and had forgotten the wand was there. He Apparated.

As he whirled through the blackness, his thoughts whipped back and forth, and he could only come to the conclusion that things were changing between him and his friends.

And that he didn't like where they were going to end up.

* * *

"Malfoy."

Potter had landed a moment ago. Draco knew, because he had heard the crack of Apparition. He hadn't bothered turning around, though, instead sitting with his legs dangling over the side of the hollow as he idly listened for the vibrations of old magic in the air, trying to make out what Dark spells had once been cast here. He had decided that Potter would probably like that more, because that way, he could pretend that he had taken Draco by surprise.

When Draco turned around to face him, though, he doubted that Potter was thinking about him one way or the other. Potter's face had a distracted look to it, and his eyes were broken like glass. He hunched down next to Draco and picked up a handful of sand to run through his fingers.

"What happened?" Draco asked. Hinting around the subject would never work with Potter, and he didn't think trusting to his natural desire to talk about it would work, either, not when Potter seemed so determined to ignore his own feelings.

"Why would you assume that something happened?" Potter muttered, keeping his head bowed.

"Because I'm not stupid," Draco snapped. "And because I'm not one of your friends, to indulge your desire to stay coddled and hidden away from the world because your emotions need wrapping in cotton wool—"

He stopped, because Potter was laughing. Horribly, silently, his shoulders shaking with the weight of it, his head bowed so that Draco couldn't see the expression on his face. But Draco still knew the motions of laughter as opposed to sobs, and thus he knew what Potter was doing. He leaned forwards and slammed a hand down next to him.

Potter reacted the way Draco had expected, bolting to his feet and whirling around as though he assumed that a magical creature or enemy wizard could have come this close without one or both of them sensing it. His fingers were so tight on his wand that Draco shook his head in disgust. "Someday, we're going to have to cure you of your paranoia," he said. "Talk about another emotion that has no right to be coddled."

Potter slowly sat back down, but still kept his wand out and resting beside him. He didn't look at Draco, either, scraping his nails over his face as though he assumed he could shave off his stubble that way. "I'm not feeling too close to my friends at the moment," he said. "And they're certainly not coddling me."

"Ah," Draco said, delighted with the inroad that anger had made. Now that Potter no longer had his mind fixated on the Mark and making Draco take it off, it was possible that he would talk about other things. "I assume they were too honest with you, then, about Gryffindor principles that I can't understand."

"They were talking about treating me like an addict because of the Dark magic," Potter said, his eyes flashing with brilliant, bitter light, and then he suddenly went still and turned his head to stare at Draco. Draco didn't know why until he remembered the curse Potter had struck him with the last time they met.

He sat still and smiled, saying nothing. Even if he had been inclined to demand an apology for that—and he could think of more useful things for Potter to use his mouth for than apologies—nothing he could ask for would match the exquisite meat hook Potter's conscience had embedded in his mind.

"Look," Potter said, when a few moments had trudged past and he'd done nothing but breathe and stare, while Draco looked calmly back. "I didn't mean—I didn't—I shouldn't have done that."

"I know," Draco said. "Why did you?"

Potter turned to stare at the ground. "Because I was panicked," he muttered. "The idea that I was free didn't mean what I thought it would."

"You expected it to be a moment of joy," Draco said. "Instead, it changed things so much that you didn't know what to think about."

To his surprise—Draco had been sure that he'd read both Potter's expression and his body language accurately—Potter merely shook his head. "No," he muttered. "It was—I—I didn't expect you to give me back my magic and get out of my mind." He raised his head reluctantly, inch by inch, until their gazes met again. "Why did you?"

Draco kept his hands to himself, even though it was an effort. He needed no conscience to tell him how delicate this moment was, how close he was to scaring Potter off again with the wrong word or movement.

"Because I knew that you wouldn't let me near you if I took more power, or tried to keep it," he said. "And with what you'll help me create, I think I can have more power than your core contains right now, anyway."

Harry stared at him with dull eyes. Draco wished that Granger and Weasley could be here right now, to see what their ill-timed "care" had done to their friend. Of course, some of it was probably Harry's fault, but Draco thought that much of what they'd done was unnecessary. That made it worse than if they were quite to blame.

"But that can't be your motive," Harry said. "You don't think about the future. You only think about the power that you have in front of you right now."

Draco laughed softly and spread his hands. "Well, Harry, as you can see, that obviously _isn't _my only motive, because I'm here, and your magic is still safe in your core, and I gave it back to you."

Harry nodded and seemed to make some effort to pull himself back from his forced contemplation of his shoes. Draco was glad. He didn't want to spend their "conversation" time trying to soothe Harry's baseless anxieties. "Yeah. Well. I reckon that I misjudged you, then, and we should start making magic."

Draco didn't think that Harry's feelings about his friends were anywhere near settled, but if he was willing to leave them alone for now, then Draco would, too. They would have the _chance _to speak more about this, thanks to the oaths. That was the wonderful thing. "Good," he said. "I want to know what kind of magic you'd like to make first."

Harry gave him a faint smile. That was more than his friends had probably got out of him within the past week, Draco thought in some triumph. "You're giving me first choice?"

"You know what I want to make," Draco said. "Weapons, and more magic. It hardly matters to me what they do, as long as they can exist. But I don't know as much about what you want, now that you have your freedom." He dropped his voice and leaned forwards, catching Harry's eye. "I'd like to know."

"All right," Harry said, after a long moment of fascinated staring, as though Draco had tried to hypnotize him. "I'd like the ability to get rid of this stupid guilt and stop feeling it every time I do something. What would help me do that? I've tried thinking about it, and letting it lie, and putting the memories into a Pensieve, and talking with other people. Nothing works."

"That's because you haven't tried a magical solution," Draco said. "Well, other than the Pensieve, and they weren't meant as solutions for things like this." He held out his hands. Hesitantly, Harry clasped one. Draco eyed him, and he took the other, too. "I'm not going to bite," Draco said. "Or excrete poison through my skin and make you fall over coughing and shaking."

"I know that," Harry said. "Rationally. Emotionally, I think I still think of you as an enemy."

"I'm flattered," Draco said, and heard a faint laugh from the direction of Harry's throat, although the next moment he peered suspiciously at Draco as if to deny that he'd ever uttered such a sound. "Now. Close your eyes and think of your magical core. Use whatever image you want to picture it. I'm going to use the glass cylinder, full to the top with light, that the scanning charm makes appear."

"Hm," Harry said, and nothing else. His breathing had gentled. Draco, the vision of the cylinder already perfect in front of his eyes, tried to control his impatience and give Harry a fair chance to get used to what he was doing, which Draco didn't think he'd done before. When Harry tipped his head forwards in what might have been a nod, Draco whispered to him.

"What does yours look like?"

"A globe," Harry whispered back. "Blue-green. It's full. It's hollow at the top, hollow inside. It's full of water that I think might slosh over if it moves."

"That's right," Draco breathed back. "That's perfect.' He took a moment to study Harry, rejoicing in the knowledge that _he _was the only one who got to see Harry like this, head bowed, an immense measure of calm passing over and through him. "Now, you remember the cylinder from the scanning spell?"

It took Harry a moment, but he did nod.

"Good," Draco said. "Now imagine the globe moving into the center of the cylinder. Move it slowly, so that the water doesn't slop out. Imagine it hovering over the center of the cylinder. Imagine it lowering, until they fuse at the top and the light covers the bottom of your globe with shadows. Can you do that for me?"

"Yes," Harry whispered, and Draco closed his eyes this time, so that he could envision it for himself. It was startlingly real, but a moment later, he wanted to laugh at himself. Of _course _it was real. They were two powerful wizards working towards blending their magical cores, and opening up a pathway between them to compensate for the lost one the Mark had created. It was unlikely that they would do something so pathetic as to create false images.

He saw the blue-green globe hovering, and then it dropped abruptly. Draco caught his breath, because Harry's idea of water about to spill had told him that Harry had certain thoughts about how fragile his core was, which could ensure that the core would be damaged if he moved it too quickly.

But the globe landed neatly, and its water leaked into the light that Draco pictured as rising from his own core.

In instants, light filled them, paraded around them, and enclosed them inside a silvery dome like an egg. Draco opened his eyes, and it was the same, the pictures of imagination brought into being. Harry was with him, and he stared around at the dome with his mouth open, obviously trying to figure out what had happened.

"What—" he began, when he caught sight of Draco.

"Shh," Draco said. "That was the first step. Now we can start making magic."


	12. To Make Anew

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twelve—To Make Anew_

Harry shivered and glanced at the silver dome again. He wasn't at all sure that he liked the idea of being shut away from the world while he and Malfoy were working on the magic—especially when he was _alone _with Malfoy.

But on the other hand, he had no reason at the moment to think that Malfoy was going to hurt him. He tried to straighten his shoulders and calm down. When he looked at Malfoy, the bastard simply stood still, arms folded, obviously waiting for him.

"If we've already combined our magic," Harry demanded, "then what is the next step?"

"Think of the way that your magic feels when you use it," Malfoy murmured in return. His voice was soft, hypnotic, but that just made Harry open his eyes wider and watch him suspiciously. Malfoy rolled his eyes and smiled back in return. "Can you imagine that? The soft hum of a successful spell, or the high that you get when you've cast a Dark spell and the wizard who hurt you is writhing on the ground?"

Harry flushed. "I don't think I ought to think of that," he muttered. "You were the last one I hurt in revenge."

"Revenge for something I hadn't done," Malfoy responded calmly. "It doesn't count. Think of a time before that. Any occasion when you could feel your magic as something separate and distinct from you, hurrying under your skin, or flowing under it, or flooding through it. Remember a time when it brought you joy."

_Joy _had been a foreign emotion for Harry for a while, but he closed his eyes obediently and remembered a Dark wizard he had chased just before the case that made the ceiling collapse on two innocents and cost him the respect of the Auror Department as well as nights of restful sleep. He could see the corridor where it had happened in his mind's eyes, a heavy underground series of chambers that the wizard had modified for his own use. The stones loomed together like the stones of Hogwarts. They were bright grey with white streaks, except where the tunnel bent towards the potions lab. They were black there, and Harry had to be careful of the way his feet came down, scattered as they were with irregular edges and fragments from Potions accidents.

The wizard, Hubert Torrington, had turned to cast a spell over his shoulder. Harry had lifted his wand and responded with a spell he had learned only a few weeks before, one that filled Torrington's mouth and throat with the feeling of fire and made him concentrate on trying not to burn to death from the inside.

Torrington wavered and went down, choking desperately. Harry laughed. The spell had whipped through him and out of him as easily as a rope flowing after a dropped stone. His body had felt filled with life, and he had taken the hex off as easily when he wanted to bind and Stun Torrington. He had been full of calm, clean happiness, the belief that, as long as he could use his magic to stop people like this man, the world was a better place.

He remembered the feeling and held onto it, as well as the sensation of the rope whipping past him. He could hold onto it, but his palms would be burned. He cradled the sensation against him again, and felt as though the magic was there, right in front of him, burning through him at the same time, and visible to other people—

"Open your eyes, Harry."

Harry did, and gaped. There _was _a cloud of shifting, flaming energy in front of him, burning blue and red and white and orange and gold, the shades of fire. He reached out a hand and held it near the cloud, and felt a faint, distant warmth, the heat of a contained hearth, beating against it.

"Interesting," Malfoy said, studying it and cocking his head as though he didn't recognize the shape of the cloud o or, more likely, the magic that Harry had used. Although he might know _some _Dark spells, he couldn't know all of them. Harry wondered what to do with the pride that flooded him at that thought, but put it aside to focus on Malfoy's next words. "Powerful magic, but what's important is the feeling."

Harry flushed again. Had he done something wrong even here, when it seemed so simple to follow Malfoy's instructions? "You said to think of a time when my magic brought me joy," he said.

Malfoy smiled at him, a smile that invited Harry into a partnership he had no notion of accepting. "Yes," he said. "And you chose a Dark spell, although I'm sure that you employed it for what seemed to you good reason. That says, to _me_, that Dark magic brings you joy, and you're less pure than you thought you were."

From the way Malfoy jumped when Harry began laughing, he hadn't expected _that _response to his accusation. "Yes, I am," Harry said, when he could get the laughter under control. "And the important thing is that I can accept and acknowledge it, and not be taken aback by it when you try to use the term to insult me."

"It wasn't an insult," Malfoy said softly.

Harry turned away from the warmth in his eyes. "You now," he said harshly. "Or is there no time when magic's brought you joy? Is power the only thing you can think of that tempts you?"

"Magic is power, too," Malfoy murmured in a distracted tone. He stood there with his eyes closed, searching for something in his memory, it seemed. Harry jammed his hands into his pockets and said nothing else, neck arched away from the bastard, trying to think of nothing but the joy.

And the possibility that magic could free him from guilt, remote though it seemed.

* * *

Draco had absolutely no trouble deciding what he wanted to think of. How he had felt when he was in Harry's mind and soul, holding the power to destroy worlds in his hands, and knowing all the while that he would surrender it, even though it would hurt, because a greater power awaited him.

The power to make Harry look at him without flinching, approval shining in his eyes.

Draco laughed even as he thought that, because he knew there was some time to go before Harry fully accepted him enough for _that _to happen. But he held the image and the hope anyway, and when he opened his eyes and hands, the cloud of his own emotions was there, softly curling green and silver. He spread his arms, and it drifted up to hover beside the fire-colored cloud that Harry had conjured.

"Looks like poison gas," Harry muttered.

Draco rolled his eyes, determined not to let Harry's bad mood ruin the moment for him. "We have the concentrated emotion now," he said. He gestured to the silver dome that enclosed them away from the world. "And we have the concentrated power. All you need to do is give me your hand." He held out his own, his stance steady and unwavering.

Harry froze, staring at him. Draco huffed. "Is the instruction that hard to follow?" he snapped. "You've managed harder things already."

"That doesn't make sense," Harry said. "I thought we would need—some ritual, some artifact, some means of channeling and directing the power."

"If we did, then we would be no different from any other partnerships who've raised power over the years," Draco pointed out. He saw Harry grimace at the term _partnership, _and knew he would have to fight against the temptation to use it ever more often. "But what's different about us is that we can _create _magic."

Harry just looked at him skeptically.

Draco sighed. Harry was the only person he knew who would demand an explanation of magical theory right in the middle of making that theory come to life. On the other hand, he was also the only one who could offer Draco access to that power, so Draco took a deep breath and settled down to explain, staring at Harry through the shifting veil of colors their magic offered.

"Yes, you're right—_ordinarily. _Ordinarily we would need an artifact or a ritual, because the power wouldn't come from our cores, or would come from them only indirectly. The ritual or whatever else we used would act as a conduit, but it would also shelter us from the force of raw magic. Wands work on the same principle, and it's the reason that you can't pick up any random stick and make it into a wand. The combination of wood and core in a wandmaker's hands makes a shield, and the shield is more valuable than just about anything else the wand does."

Harry looked as though he were calming down. Draco paused, but it wasn't a temporary aberration; Harry gestured for him to go on, looking no more tense than before. If he was reading sinister motives into Draco's pause, he kept that idea well-hidden.

"We don't need the shield," Draco said softly, "any more than we need to be shielded from our own cores. The magic is _part _of us. We can create it anew, with no more fuel than our dreams and imaginations." He took a step closer to Harry, unable to resist the temptation as his own words moved him, although he saw Harry tense again. "They say that nothing can come from nothing, but dreams do. What are they born from but ambition, concentrated ambition, and desire? The same thing is true of emotions—"

"Get to the point, Malfoy." Harry looked over his shoulder as if he were considering running, although the dome was small.

"My _point_," Draco said, "is that our magic comes from the same category this time. We need to learn how to control it, but once we have this, this visual representation of what we're aiming for," and he nodded at the colored clouds, "then we can be sure that the magic will know what to do."

Harry blew out his breath hard enough to make his fringe ripple and shook his head. "I don't know, Malfoy. It still sounds mental."

"Then it'll do no harm to try something and see how it works, will it?" Draco reached out a commanding hand, and Harry stepped towards him, less fearful, he thought, than reluctant for form's sake. "Come, just take my hand—yes, hold on the wrist, that's right—and think of the goal of being free of the guilt. Close your eyes if it'll help," he added, because Harry had started to close his eyes and then abruptly yanked them open again.

Harry peered at him suspiciously. "How can _you_ envision me being free of guilt?"

Draco laughed silently at him and slid a hand around his flank. Harry jumped but didn't move away, and Draco's heart pounded. He had known that desire hid under Harry's sharpness, if only the desire to stop running and face the truth for once. His friends had been stupid to drive him from them. If they had been calm and conciliating, then Harry might have listened to what they wanted to say.

_As long as it didn't involve the complete condemnation of him, of course. _Draco thought that the kindest, mildest soul would rebel at that, and Harry had one of the fiercest souls he'd ever known.

"Believe me," Draco whispered, "it's no trouble at all." And he moved his hand back to Harry's shoulder, and held it there until Harry nodded shortly, convinced, it seemed, and let his eyes flutter shut.

Draco fixed his mind on an image of Harry smiling, Harry laughing, Harry admitting that he had made mistakes but he didn't have to torment himself about them for the rest of his life. It wasn't nearly as hard as Harry had thought it would be, he knew, because Harry free had been one of his goals as well as Harry's.

They had simply thought of him being free of different things, that was all.

* * *

Harry felt stupid standing there. He didn't know what to think of. At least the memory of using magic on Torrington was a specific one. He might as well think of an abstract concept as think of himself being free of guilt.

Then again, guilt was an abstract concept, and joy was an abstract concept, and he ought to be able to manage magic that represented them both if he could find it to represent one.

Harry bit his lip and tried to ignore the sensation of Malfoy's hand on his shoulder. The warmth of the fingers melted first, then their length, then their weight, and Harry's mind swam and dived in the middle of a heaving sea of ideas.

Guilt. It was like a stone, like a bridle around his neck when he wanted to run, like the bars of a cage holding him back. He had thought for a long time that he _needed _it to be like that, because otherwise he would do horrible things. He had a lot of power, given his magic and his name and his status in wizarding society. He needed something to hold him in check. What else would ensure the freedom of other people?

Only recently had he started thinking about that and noticed some flaws in his reasoning. There was no reason that he had to take away the freedom of others; that wasn't something he had ever dreamed of doing.

_Unlike Malfoy, _he thought, and resentment tightened in his belly.

But Malfoy had held back at the last moment, too, and Harry wasn't supposed to be thinking about him; he was supposed to be thinking about the moment when he would be free of guilt, or at least what he would look and feel like then. With a determined huff, he turned away from the familiar litany of Malfoy's flaws and back to his own, unknown self.

Well, he had sacrificed the power of his name and reputation in Britain, he thought. If they had found out that he'd murdered Robards, he would be wanted for the crime. If they hadn't, they probably thought he was dead, and they would ask how he had survived, and not be pleased at the only truth he had to tell.

Robards had been a popular Head Auror. Harry's fame might survive even that blow for some people, but it wouldn't for others. And even if Harry could prove that Robards had been in Malfoy's service for years, there would still be sympathy for him; why had _Harry _escaped, and if it was possible, why hadn't he helped Robards to win free?

That was gone. He didn't have to feel guilt for all the imaginary crimes that he might have committed by influencing people to act as they thought he wanted.

That left his magic.

But his magic was shared in common with Malfoy, and equal to Malfoy's, and could only increase with Malfoy's help. And Harry rejected the notion that he should labor in bondage forever because of that. He hadn't _asked _for it to happen. He hadn't even asked Malfoy to pour his magic back into Harry's core.

He could still feel guilt over hurting Malfoy with the Cruciatus Curse—

But Malfoy didn't want him to feel that. That was something, at least, and Harry gathered up the hope and held it close to him the way he had done with the joyous memory a short time ago.

Ron and Hermione might say that he should feel guilty for using the Dark Arts. But Harry had already dealt with his own feelings about that, and acknowledged that it might happen again any time he felt threatened. Useless to put it, and keep it, on a list of things that he should suffer for.

There were fewer things that he should suffer for than he had thought, Harry decided, and took a surprised breath.

He shook with a feeling of relief. If he could let go of so much, then that meant—

But he winced and stopped as he came to the memory of bringing the roof down on two people who hadn't deserved it, two innocents. It had been a mistake, but it had happened because he mispronounced a word in an incantation. Shouldn't he know his spells better than that? Or at least, shouldn't he have stayed there and died with them, instead of Apparating out the moment the roof began to creak? He'd heard the sound and reacted with the instincts that the Aurors had trained into him, the way he was _supposed _to, but that also meant that he hadn't grabbed the two people trapped there in the flames to take with him.

He should have been able to hesitate. He should have reached out to them, and then they wouldn't have died. He shouldn't have made the mistake in the first place.

He wavered, torn between the image of himself without guilt, and the image of himself as a criminal who had, at the very least, been negligent in his studies. He had warped instincts, a warped memory if he couldn't hold onto spells—

He thought that, and he bowed his head, and he wondered how he could overcome the weight of that particular guilt.

_It only hurts you because it's recent._

Harry started, and his eyes flew open. The first thing he had thought of was that Malfoy hadn't removed all of the Mark after all, and was still speaking along the silent channel that its existence had opened up between them. But Malfoy shook his head, eyes narrowed, and Harry realized they stood in the middle of a clinging golden veil that didn't resemble any of their magic thus far. From flickers of fire around the edges of it, though, he knew their joy had blended with the magic they were raising now.

_I can speak to you because that's the nature of the connection that we're forging. And you have other crimes to atone for—if you want to think of it that way—things that hurt you. People who died, and I know you blamed yourself for it as you blame yourself for these two dying. You got over those deaths, because they were years ago. That's how I know that you have the capacity not to torment yourself forever. But you _act _as though you do. You forget forgetting._

Harry winced. _I can trust you to see me mercilessly, of course, _he responded, trying to act as though he regarded the whole thing as a joke.

_But isn't that what you wanted? _Malfoy pressed closer, all bright eyes and snake-smile. _Didn't you want someone who would judge you and see you for what you really are, which you think is worthless? But when your friends judged you, and when I did, you found out that you didn't want to be judged after all. You aren't the saint or the martyr that you like to think of yourself as. Content yourself with that judgment, Potter: that you have a normal soul after all, magnificent neither for its goodness nor for its evil._

Harry opened his mouth to retort—

And found himself with an image of what he would look like free of guilt after all. It was unusual, because it didn't look different from the face he saw in the mirror every day, but perhaps that was the point. Free of the emotions that crippled him, he would be an ordinary human being, the one that Malfoy said he saw, the flawed one that Ron and Hermione saw all the time.

Except that he would be flawed unacceptably, in Ron and Hermione's view, and that made him hesitate.

_What do you care about what they say and think? _Malfoy stepped away from him and paced in a circle, his eyes never leaving Harry's. Harry knew that he must have turned around at some point, so that he could see Malfoy walking behind him, but he never remembered the moment when he did turn. _They've rejected you. They want you to stop using Dark Arts. They want you to pretend that the Mark never happened, that Robards never betrayed you, that you never felt the ability to make magic, to _create _it, throbbing through you like the flow of blood. You can't do that._

Harry bared his teeth. _No, I can't. _And he reached out and gathered the vision close to his heart at last, his own face, as if seen in a mirror, his eyes wide and startled but not dark with shadows that he couldn't explain, his soul flinching from the searing fire that Malfoy had exposed it to but otherwise undamaged, and showed it to him.

Malfoy smiled and seemed to hold up a mirror at the same time. It reflected Harry's image; it _was _Harry's image, reversed, the same but with stronger prominence given to the light than the lack of darkness. Harry blinked.

The images drifted away from their hands, floating in midair like the clouds of colored fire. Harry watched as they blended, uncertain what had happened so far, or what would happen next.

_This is magic, _Malfoy whispered to him. _The magic that you asked for. Awakening you to your needs, awakening you to the fact that you long for judgment but reject it when it arrives, letting you know that you aren't better or worse than many others. Why did you fancy that you were?_

_ I had such power, _Harry muttered, never taking his eyes from the images, or the single replica of his own face they had become, now. It turned around in midair and continued to drift. Harry thought it was heading for a definite destination, but he didn't know what that could be. _I could have misused it._

_But you didn't, _Draco murmured. _Granger and Weasley are the sorts of people who think that actions count for nothing, that motivations are all. But you know they aren't. You know that there exists a difference between you and the wizards you fought, in what they used their power for and what you used yours for. And you know that you feel more charitable towards me for freeing you from slavery, even though you don't like why I did it._

Harry tried to scowl over his shoulder at him, but Draco leaned heavily on him and pointed at the image. It had turned to face them again, and this time, a random, mild shimmer ran around it, green and gold. Harry could feel the charge building and thought they were close to the moment when the magic would act or react, for good or ill.

_Now, _Draco whispered—when was he Draco? Harry hadn't noticed the moment his mind made the change. _We are both members of the same world with this—_

The image burst soundlessly, and Harry gasped as the light fell on him, settled into him, ran in glittering pinpricks down the side of his soul—

And he saw himself as Malfoy saw him, arrogant and hotheaded and wrong most of the time, but still someone who did much more good than harm.

_How can I be sure that this is true? _Harry whispered, as lightness nearly lifted him off his feet.

_Consider it a corrective to your vision of yourself, _Malfoy murmured to him. He sounded tired. _Neither are true, but in between them, we can find the truth._

And Harry opened his eyes, and the guilt had taken its place among the other elements of his soul, neither overmastering nor nonexistent, and Malfoy stood beside him, swaying, and the silver dome was gone.


	13. Face the Sunset

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of _Loup-garou. _Thank you for coming along, and I hope everyone enjoyed it until the end. (There will be a fourth fic in the series, but I don't know when I'll start working on it).

_Chapter Thirteen—Face the Sunset_

Harry didn't know how long he spent in the hollow, walking in circles and breathing deeply to test the new lightness in his lungs. The guilt was gone. There had been weight everywhere, on his neck, on his arms, on his knees, and he hadn't realized it until it vanished.

Malfoy just sat on the edge of the hollow and watched him with a careful, smug smile on his lips. Harry nearly couldn't bring himself to resent it. The git knew that Harry couldn't have done this without him, and Harry knew it, and as long as Malfoy didn't bring it up too often, Harry thought he could live with it.

Then he started when he saw the sun sinking towards the western horizon and hastily drew his wand. He had to Apparate back to Ron and Hermione's house and try to explain everything before it got dark.

And then his hand twitched and dropped, because he was remembering the last words Ron had spoken to him before he left. He swallowed.

"Harry?"

Harry shook his head. He didn't think a trace remained of the Mark, not anymore, and the bond between them that had let Malfoy speak into his head had dissolved when the magic had. But he was still uncomfortable with Malfoy even _acting _like he could read Harry's thoughts. He reckoned that he always would be.

Malfoy repeated his name behind him, softly, and Harry heard the soft plop as he dropped into the hollow. Harry felt the bastard's hand on his shoulder a moment later. Harry shrugged it off and moved away a few steps, starting to pace for a different reason. He had to think out what he was going to do, whether he should go back to his friends' house and try to repair their friendship—or at least convince them that he wasn't mad, addicted, whatever—or try to find a place in Muggle Sydney.

Then Malfoy stepped into his way and Harry had to stop walking or run him over. Actually, he would have preferred that second option, but he stopped out of reflex before he could think that he shouldn't.

"Harry." Malfoy's voice was patient, as it had been a moment before, but now Harry could see his eyes, and they were bright with something that meant he wasn't patient at all. "I couldn't help but notice that it's getting dark."

"Good for you, finally learning to tell the time," Harry snapped, and winced as he thought of what would happen if he went back now. Ron and Hermione were probably having dinner and wondering where he was. Or running around in frantic circles and wondering where he was. He winced again at the thought of the expression on Ron's face when he'd Apparated away. He shouldn't have done that. He didn't _know _that his friend was going to curse him, and—

Harry paused. Then he repeated the thoughts again. He added an extra image, this time, what Ron and Hermione's faces would look like when he finally broke down and told them the truth about creating new magic with Malfoy.

The guilt…

It just didn't have the same volume or keenness anymore. It didn't hurt him the same way.

Harry swallowed. "Malfoy," he said carefully, "you mentioned that we didn't need a ritual or a wand to control and channel the power anymore, right?"

"Yes," Malfoy said. "That's correct. Because we were drawing from our cores—"

Harry waved him to silence. He _knew _that the magical theory Malfoy was about to tell him was irrelevant, and that was enough by itself to make him not want to listen. "Fine, fine. But it _felt _like a ritual when we were going through it. In fact, I don't think we created magic at all. We only used what was already there. We're both powerful enough, we could have done it. Why did you say that we were creating magic?"

Malfoy paused, staring at him. "So you didn't feel as though that magic was different from any you'd ever done?" he asked carefully.

Harry shook his head. "Of _course _it was. No incantation, no wands, more intimate. But it wasn't different in its nature. I don't think the magic increased. So far, I only have your word for it that it has," he added.

Malfoy pointed in silence to the melted sand on the other side of the hollow where he'd used his fire a few days ago.

Harry sighed and shook his head again. "Fine," he repeated. "But that only shows that you can do something that you couldn't do before. It wasn't a new spell, or something that any other wizard would find impossible."

Malfoy regarded him with lifted eyebrows and a faint smile. "None of this has anything to do with what you're _really _concerned about," he said softly. "What's your question?"

Harry ground his teeth. "What—did—we—do?" he demanded. "I thought we'd only eliminated the unnecessary guilt I was carrying around, but I just tried to feel _ordinary _guilt, and it's not as strong! What the fuck did we _do_?"

* * *

_Ah._

Well, Draco thought philosophically, suppressing his small flicker of disappointment, he reckoned that it would have been stupid to expect Harry to understand magical theory all at once, especially magical theory that had remained the province of mad idealists for the entirety of history until now, with no chance of becoming practice.

"We changed your nature so that you were purged of your guilt," Draco told him calmly. "I pictured you as free of guilt. You did the same thing, but I think our foci were slightly different. I didn't _intend _to make further occurrences of that emotion weaker, but given that our foci didn't match, and we were both pouring incredibly powerful magic at slightly different targets, while conjuring new magic to join the old when it began to run out—theoretically, this spell is possible, but beyond one's reach because one would collapse before finishing it—this is a reasonable side-effect."

Harry closed his eyes and said something so softly that Draco couldn't hear it, once. Then he turned and began to jog towards the far side of the hollow. Draco kept pace with him, matching him when Harry sped up, apparently doing what he could to get away. Draco didn't know why he bothered. First of all, he had to know that Draco would find him wherever he went. Second, he could have Apparated if he was that serious.

"Harry," he said. "You know that you wanted this, and you agreed to it of your own free will."

Harry said nothing, didn't even grunt. He just kept trotting with his head bowed as though pushing his way through a thick wave.

"Where are you going?" Draco asked, a question he felt he was owed an answer to.

"To Ron and Hermione's house," Harry finally said, and the disappointment Draco felt then was nothing to what he felt when he heard Harry's addition. "To tell them that they were right about everything."

Draco sighed, seized one of his wrists, and wrenched it down hard. Harry spun to a stop, yelping, and glared at Draco from a few inches, away, his breaths sharp and indignant. Draco closed his eyes and tried not to revel in the way that Harry made him feel just standing close to him. That would dissipate his anger, and he knew he needed that anger at the moment.

"You're an idiot," he said.

"Yes, we've established that you have reason to think so." That was all the warning Draco got before Harry pulled sharply against his confinement, leaning away, aiming for the side of the hollow he'd abandoned a minute before.

Draco lost his hold, but grabbed another in a moment. Harry swore at him, and Draco opened his eyes to laugh in his face. Harry froze mid-snarl, staring at him.

"We both know that you could have just Apparated," Draco hissed. "There are things living under _rocks _that know you could have just Apparated. That you didn't says something important. Special. It says that you want to stay right here for right now, or that you want me to stop you."

Harry shook his head. The mulish look was back on his face again, just when Draco had begun to think that the revelations in the silver dome had blanked it out forever. "If I don't have a conscience, then I'm a monster. That was what Ron and Hermione were worried about, and that's what's happened. Why is this so hard for you to _fucking understand, _Malfoy?" He was shouting suddenly, his mouth less than an inch from Draco's face.

Draco patiently wiped away a few flecks of spittle and shook his head. "You have no idea what I think or feel, and yet you presume to lecture me. And you have no real idea what happened with the exchange of magic between us, either. We lessened the pressure of your guilt on your real life—if you like, sped up the self-forgiveness process that you now know happened _anyway _to a few days instead of a few months. You can still feel guilt. You've proven that in the past minute. You have a conscience, still." _No matter how much more convenient it would be if you did not._

Harry closed his eyes. Draco thought he was fighting back tears, or groans of hatred, or something. He waited impatiently. It would have to happen, and he would have to explain to Harry _again _about how guilt didn't make someone a more worthy human being, and Harry would reply that he knew that but it was just _different _for him, and there would be more promises and more of the oath tugging on him and who knew when they would get to make magic together again and—

"Yeah. All right."

Draco blinked and stared. It took him long moments to realize that he was actually standing in front of Harry in the hollow, and that Harry was making sense, which was more than Draco had thought he would make. "What?" he whispered.

Harry avoided his eyes but didn't try to pull away from Draco's touch this time, instead staring at the orange sand between his feet. "You're right," he said. "I should have Apparated. I should have just fucking Apparated. It would be so easy. There are no wards here to prevent me. It _should _have been that way. But I didn't. I think I wanted you to stop me and say what you did."

Draco didn't say, "I know you did," because there were certain limits to what he thought Harry would tolerate. He just nodded and looked thoughtful until he realized that he wasn't dreaming, then murmured, "What are you going to do now?"

Harry tugged once on his hair with the hand that he had torn free from Draco's grip. "I need to talk to Ron and Hermione," he said. "But I can't go back to their house. I don't want to stay there. I want to meet in a neutral setting."

"What are you going to do about food and housing in the meantime?" Draco asked. He didn't let go of Harry's wrist, because he wasn't stupid, and because he rather liked the shift of warm skin over smooth bone beneath his touch.

"I don't know," Harry said, which had the virtue of honesty, if not of being the answer Draco wanted. "Get a Muggle place, I reckon. I brought some money with me, and it might not be simple to get it changed, but—"

"Come with me," Draco whispered. He had known he would make the offer, but he was a little ashamed of the _speed _with which he made it. He would have liked a little more time of talking to Harry first, to ease him in and soften him up. But Harry wasn't the only one whose body was betraying him tonight.

Harry blinked at him. "Of course you must be staying somewhere," he said. "But I assumed it was with friends who would—"

He didn't finish the sentence, probably because he didn't want to, but also because Draco didn't let him, shaking his head furiously, pressing in, leaning against Harry until he made a protesting sound and shoved him back. But Draco had made his point, and Harry stood still, staring into his eyes, while Draco answered softly, "I'm staying somewhere private, tailored to my needs. Come with me there."

He would have tried to make the last statement into a question, if he could. He knew how angry Harry would be if he didn't.

But he didn't manage, and so he just had to wait, while Harry stared at the sky and the sand and Draco's shirt as if they would give him the response to his questions, as if they would tell him whether he had become the unnatural monster he feared, or only another version of himself. Draco knew the answer to that, of course, but he had accepted—finally—that he sometimes had to let Harry find the answers for himself.

* * *

_Fuck._

Harry had thought Malfoy wouldn't make the offer, because he had counted on having to confront Ron and Hermione _anyway_. And, well, of course he would find another place somewhere in Australia, because Malfoy seemed content to stay here for now, and Harry had to remain nearby to complete the oath. But this, even though it made sense, simply wasn't something he could have anticipated.

Or _allowed _himself to anticipate. That might be a better summary of his position, he thought wryly.

"Harry." Malfoy was getting impatient, curling his fingers into Harry's shirt at the shoulder and holding them there. But the next moment, when Harry shot him a glance, he seemed to regret that he'd said anything, biting his lip hard and blinking.

Harry sighed. Things had changed. He knew they had. It was just that, every time he thought he'd come to terms with them, he was startled anew by just _how much _they had changed. Maybe this was the last one, the last fall. Maybe this was the last time that he would lie to himself.

Then he grimaced and mentally rearranged the thought. _The last time I'll lie to myself about this particular subject._

"If I go back with you," he said, "you won't try to Mark me again, or fuck me, or touch me more than you're doing right now." It was an arbitrary standard to pick, but then again, Malfoy would probably touch him sometimes, if only by accident. And Harry had learned today that he'd pretty much been living by arbitrary standards all along; it was just that he'd been better at disguising it from himself until now.

Malfoy's eyes widened with a look Harry recognized because he'd seen it in the dome. Joy, honest joy. Harry snorted. He didn't understand why he brought that feeling to Malfoy, but at least it was a nice change that _someone _wanted him around.

"No," Malfoy said. His voice wasn't—breathless, Harry wouldn't say that, but it had leaped into a new dimension where it could sound different. He leaned against Harry for a moment as though he wanted to hold him, then stepped back and spread his hands out. "See, not touching."

Harry nodded. Maybe he was tired of fighting what seemed to be inevitable. Maybe it was because Malfoy had made a promise that, for once, he trusted. Maybe he was still trying to make up for the idea that he had hurt Malfoy, _really _hurt him, with the Cruciatus Curse, and this was a way to do it. Maybe he just wanted a place to stay for one night.

All of those could have been possible motives. At the moment, he didn't feel the need to choose among them. Harry put out a hand, and Malfoy clasped it and Side-Along Apparated them. The last sight Harry saw before the darkness of the transition closed around them was the look of dazed, drunk happiness on Malfoy's face.

Which. Well. Harry might consider that he had some good luck in this situation after all, if he was responsible for putting that there.

* * *

The instant they entered Thylacine's Lair, Draco stepped away from Harry, keeping his promise. Harry gave him a faint smile and turned around, as if he wanted to study the walls for any signs of a secret passage. Draco didn't question him. He thought Harry would appreciate some privacy at the moment as he tried to deal with the consequences of a decision that must be momentous for him.

Hell, Draco would like some privacy himself, but for a very different reason.

The moment he turned away from Harry, though, he saw the envelope that lay on the bed. He could feel his pupils widen as his heart began to race. He didn't think Harry would notice such subtle signs even if his back wasn't turned, but he still moved further away and didn't touch the envelope until he saw Harry engaged in examining some of the carved thylacines, his brow wrinkled as he tried to make out what they were.

Draco turned the envelope around and murmured to the fox seal on the back, "Jaguar's paw." The seal parted and dissolved, and he took out the paper inside, the letter that he knew Thalia had written to him, from the color and size and thickness of the envelope.

All those things together could convey a lot at once. For example, that things had gone badly wrong in Fox Valley, more wrong than Draco could imagine them going while Lisa was in charge. Perhaps the Ministry had finally found out about them. It was true that Draco was the one who could best wield the magic of the bracelets he usually stored their stolen power in and the lenses that stole it. Lisa might not have been able to defend the place as effectively as he could.

But Draco knew already that all that was untrue. So his hands were steady as he pulled out the letter that Thalia had sent him, but it was hard to keep his face blank.

The letter was short. Well, it wouldn't need to be long for her to give all that he required in the way of information.

_Lord Malfoy,_

_ Lisa has claimed that she found a way to break the Mark, and is taking over Fox Valley for herself. She can't use the mirrors well, but she has driven Oliver, Mina, Victor, and me out of the valley. Come back._

Thalia hadn't signed her name, but the envelope and the words that had unlocked the seal, the references to her Animagus form, told Draco all he needed to know. He shut his eyes and stood there, silent, thinking.

He would have felt Lisa's rebellion, of course, with the links that he maintained—still—to her soul and her magic.

On the other hand, he had thought before Harry ran to Australia that he would be able to track a Marked one anywhere in the world. And the distance had proven too much for the Mark. Draco shook his head, slightly. He should have researched better before he made the Mark, rather than trusting that he had done something so clever no one could find a way to undo it.

There was the way that he had taken the Mark off Harry, for example. There was the way that Harry had nearly committed suicide. Two ways to reverse his dominion. He didn't think either would be available to Lisa, but he didn't _know _that, not for certain. And so, he also didn't know for certain that he would have felt her breaking the Mark, or planning to break it. Increase the distance between him and his slaves and add the unknown properties of what might have happened to change the Marks when he had his core changed, and—yes, it was possible.

Draco held the cold rage at bay until he heard Harry turn around and look at him. "What is it?" Harry asked. If he was surprised to see the letter in Draco's hand when he hadn't noticed it before, he didn't show it.

Draco laid the letter down and turned to face Harry. Harry recoiled, or tried to, and then lifted his chin and stared back. Draco relaxed. It was good to know that many things could alter between them, but the burn of the defiance would always be there.

"What happened?" Harry repeated.

"One of my Marked ones claims to have broken free and is turning the others out of the Valley," Draco responded. "I am going to England to break her and take back what's mine. I assume that you'll be coming along." He smiled brightly at Harry. "I have that goal now—the one you always accused me of lacking."

* * *

The first thing Harry felt was a jeweled flame of admiration, rage, and regret springing to life in his soul.

_If there's another way to break the Mark, then I didn't need to make the oath to him. I didn't need to maintain the connection. I could have broken free if I'd just been patient, if I'd just waited—_

And then Harry shook his head, hard, and banished the flame. He wasn't _in _that position. If he was still Marked, there might have been a point in regretting his decision not to wait. But he was free now, except for the oath, and Malfoy wasn't bound to him, except by _his _oath.

So things weren't as simple as that, and he couldn't change the past, and he had to react to Malfoy's words _now_, not as he would have them be.

"I don't see why you need my company," he said. "To do something evil, I mean, and that's what I'll always think your business is."

Malfoy took a swift step towards him. He was unsheathed now, his eyes shining with wild colors, his magic beating around him in a bright, swift pulse that Harry could see without much squinting. His hand slammed into the wall beside Harry.

"We have the oath," he said. "And I have already thought of at least two ways that Lisa could have broken the Mark."

"Oh?" Harry asked, uninterested. Or he told himself he was, at least. He didn't know if he could be, with his own magic responding to Malfoy's, stirring in him and spreading wings that invaded his limbs.

"Yes," Malfoy said. "By sacrificing all her magic, as you did, without someone to rescue her, as I did you." His eyes swept up and down Harry, and a small smile curved his mouth. "But something kept her from dying, if that's the case. Wouldn't you like to know what that thing is? It might be useful, in case you ever want to end the connection between us and stop creating magic."

_Bastard. _Harry gritted his teeth. "What's the second way?"

"By splitting her soul," Malfoy said softly. "By creating a Horcrux. And I think that you have some sort of moral objection to wizards running about and doing that, if I remember correctly."

Harry's breathing sped up. His magic reached out, spinning patterns of color that connected with and brushed through and braided to Malfoy's. When he tried to take a step back, a powerful yank forced him to stand where he was.

Malfoy could be wrong. He could be lying. But the magic that danced around him didn't lie, and neither did the light of their joining that filled the room, brilliant like the colors of sunset.

And neither did the oath, biting gently into Harry's collarbone.

He shrugged a bit. "Looks like I'm going with you."

Malfoy smiled, and dipped for a kiss.

And only laughed when Harry twisted his head to the side and bit, instead.

Harry closed his eyes, listening to his thrumming heart, his thrumming blood, his thrumming magic, and bit down more savagely on Malfoy's throat, leaving a mark of his own as Malfoy had once offered to let him do. True, it wasn't against Malfoy's will, which had been the attraction of that particular offer before, but that was more Malfoy's kink and not Harry's.

_I reckon I am going with him, after all._

_ To the end, whatever it is._

**The End.**


End file.
